Animal life began in aquatic environments more than 600 million years ago. Around 500 million years ago, during the Cambrian ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Once upon a time, there were a bunch of one-celled microbes, swimming, eating, reproducing, doing all the things that a one-cell ...

Until now, there was a conflict in the field of paleontology. Genetic analysis of how fast traits mutated and evolved ...

A remarkable assemblage of fossils from China is revealing that animal life diversified in Earth’s primordial seas millions of years earlier than previously known, with an array of forms including ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. An artist’s impression depicts Kryoryctes at Dinosaur Cove in Australia. New research supports the hypothesis that Kryoryctes is a ...

The transition from water to land is a question that still intrigues scientists. Those ancient organisms would have needed to adapt to several new challenges to life out of water. So, how did they do ...

A fossil bed in China containing animals up to 554 million years old suggests that we may have to reconsider the idea that ...

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 ...

Embryonic germ layers are the fundamental organizing principle in animal development. They provide the structural basis from which tissues and organs arise. During early embryogenesis, cells divide to ...

In five cases where vertebrates evolved monogamy, the same changes in gene expression occurred each time. In many non-monogamous species, females provide all or most of the offspring care. In ...

The discovery of why some birds emit more heat than others can be used for both conservation and the creation of ...

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 ...