Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. Fossil discoveries unlock chapters of our planet’s storied ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Most phylogenies exist in academic papers and remain difficult to interpret. Cornell’s Birds of the World Phylogeny Explorer puts ...

A ‘one of a kind’ fossil discovery could transform our understanding of how the unique brains and intelligence of modern birds evolved, one of the most enduring mysteries of vertebrate evolution.

(CNN) — When a fossil preserves an animal’s complete body in a death pose, seeing it is observing a snapshot in time. Several such fossils exist for Archaeopteryx — the earliest known bird — and now, ...

An 80-million-year-old fossil bird has been discovered with a skull so exquisitely preserved that scientists have been able to study the detailed structure of its brain. The fossil, which bears a ...