Animals, from worms and sponges to jellyfish and whales, contain anywhere from a few thousand to tens of trillions of nearly genetically identical cells. Depending on the organism, these cells arrange ...

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 ...

One of the biggest quests in biology is understanding how every cell in an animal’s body carries an identical genome yet still gives rise to a kaleidoscope of different cell types and tissues. A ...

Evolution isn’t a single, straightforward process – it works in several distinct ways. From species splitting apart over time to unrelated animals developing similar traits, these patterns reveal how ...

A millimeter-sized sea animal could hold clues to the evolution of the human nervous system. While placozoans are simple animals only as big as a grain of sand, the blobs have unique cells that could ...

That’s the conclusion of a new study in Nature, which pitted synthetic bacterial cells against the force of evolution. Stripped down to a skeletal genetic blueprint, the artificial cells started with ...

The natural world doesn’t always fit neatly into our defined boundaries, says Will Newton ...