The humble rodent “thumb” may not seem like an obvious window into evolution, but its keratinized tip – the unguis (hoof, claw, or nail) – turns out to reveal striking insights into rodent history and ...

Meet the evolutionary hipster that beat Portland to weirdness by 30 million years. We’ve just found North America’s oldest beaver fossils. They’re rewriting everything we thought about these ...

Researchers (left to right) Gordon Shepherd, Anderson Feijó, Lauren Johnson, and Rafaela Missagia, working in the Field Museum’s mammal collections. Picture a squirrel eating an acorn. It’s holding ...

The legions of squirrels breaking into backyard bird feeders benefit from a surprising trait developed over millions of years—tiny hands with four claws and a human-looking thumbnail. This combination ...

The surprising story of mammal evolution begins long before the age of dinosaurs. Witness how some of our prehistoric mammal relatives survived global catastrophes, defying extinction and evolving ...