In a world where evolutionary biology often gets boiled down to simplistic hierarchies of "primitive" and "advanced" species, a new book by University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) biologist ...

All life on Earth shares a common ancestor that lived roughly four billion years ago. This so-called “last universal common ancestor” represents the most ancient organism that researchers can study.

If we look across the whole of the mammal branch of the tree of life, we find there are many groups of mammals that have ...

The three-dimensional shape of a protein can be used to resolve deep, ancient evolutionary relationships in the tree of life, according to a new study. It is the first time researchers use data from ...

Last month, the Bean Life Science Museum opened its new exhibit, the Evolutionary Tree of Life, to the public. “It was a fabulous feeling,” said museum director Michael Whiting. Whiting said the ...

To understand how organisms are related, researchers use molecular information to construct phylogenetic trees. Most of the time, scientists use thousands of protein-coding sequences to determine ...