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 ...

Scientists uncovered a 149-million-year-old bird fossil in southeastern China with unexpectedly modern traits they believe could rewrite the evolutionary history of birds. The recently discovered ...

The fossil of a Jurassic bird unearthed in southeastern China has major implications for the history of avian evolution, researchers say. Subscribe to read this story ad-free Get unlimited access to ...

(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 ...

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.