A microorganism whose evolutionary roots can be traced to the era of the first multicellular animals may provide a glimpse of how single-celled organisms made a critical evolutionary leap. In ...

Once upon a time, there were a bunch of one-celled microbes, swimming, eating, reproducing, doing all the things that a one-cell bit of life can do. Then, some time later, there were their descendants ...

One of the biggest quests in biology is understanding how every cell in an animal's body carries an identical genome yet ...

Animals can evolve separately but end up evolving toward other species, too, or even spontaneously evolve the same characteristics in totally separate groups. Birds and bats can both fly using ...

Some feathered dinosaurs may have lost the ability to fly, revealing that the evolution of flight was far more complex than ...

It's not easy to look at a sea spider and see an animal so representative of its kind that it may help scientists sort out the evolution of almost everything with eight legs. But that's the potential ...

An artist’s impression depicts Kryoryctes at Dinosaur Cove in Australia. New research supports the hypothesis that Kryoryctes is a common ancestor of both the platypus and echidna. - Peter Schouten ...

The evolution of some of the earliest complex animals on our planet may have been spurred on by other, simpler early animals. These simple marine animals first evolved around 560 million years ago and ...

Evolution is a continuous, powerful force shaping the natural world around us. As environmental pressures intensify, future animal evolution is likely to produce fascinating and sometimes bizarre new ...

The most comprehensive dataset of termite genomes to date was created by an international team of scientists, led by ...

To understand the origins of multicelled life, researchers are studying a motley assortment of simpler animal relatives. The commonalities they’re unearthing offer a trove of clues about our mutual ...