“Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution”. Conservation biology was established to address the processes that endangered biodiversity in the form of species, populations, communities, and ecosystems. Traditionally conservation biologists were mainly concerned with aspects related to ecology, demography, behavior, and physiology. As human impacts on earth’s biota intensify and diversify across scales, the focus of the field has expanded to address other aspects from ecology to molecular mechanisms such as genetic diversity and adaptive evolution. More and more studies are now addressing how biodiversity responds to evolving threats whose impacts on biodiversity span years to decades and centuries. These studies go beyond the traditional fields in conservation biology such as conservation ecology and behavior. Integrating evolutionary principles into conservation biology science and practice can reveal the nature of the problem, which has attracted more and more attention from conservation biologists. Hereby, we propose a new branch of conservation biology: the conservation evolutionary biology in order to strengthen the application of evolutionary principles in solving the conservation issues of species. Conservation evolutionary biology integrates the principles and methods of evolutionary biology into conservation biology research. It aims to explore the past, present and future of species status from the perspective of evolution. Likewise, it aims to reveal how species adapt to and respond to environmental changes to ensure long-term persistence, and to clarify the process of species endangerment and evolutionary potential. A major goal is to provide scientific basis for formulating forward-looking strategies for species conservation. Here, the origin, development, research contents, research methods and significance of conservation evolutionary biology are briefly introduced to stimulate further development of the field.