For some three billion years, unicellular organisms ruled Earth. Then, around one billion years ago, a new chapter of life began. Early attempts at team living began to stick, paving the way for the ...

The transition from single-celled organisms to multicellular ones was a major step in the evolution of complex life forms. Multicellular organisms arose hundreds of millions of years ago, but the ...

The temperature-size rule (TSR) is an intraspecific phenomenon describing the phenotypic plastic response of an organism size to the temperature: individuals reared at cooler temperatures mature to be ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Scientists are discovering ways in which single cells might have evolved traits that entrenched ...

The evolution of multicellular organisms is a central process in the course of the origin of life. In most cases, an organism is multicellular for only part of its life cycle: the simplest ...

For billions of years, single-celled creatures had the planet to themselves, floating through the oceans in solitary bliss. Some microorganisms attempted multicellular arrangements, forming small ...

Throughout the history of life on Earth, multicellular life evolved from single cells numerous times, but explaining how this happened is one of the major evolutionary puzzles of our time. However, ...

Chromosphaera perkinsii is a single-celled species discovered in 2017 in marine sediments around Hawaii. The first signs of its presence on Earth have been dated at over a billion years, well before ...

Living things are identified and categorised on the basis of their body design in relation to their form and function. So, the classification of life forms is closely related to their evolution ...

Scaling up from one cell to many may have been a small step rather than a giant leap for early life on Earth. A single-celled organism closely related to animals controls its life cycle using a ...

Images of the multicellular development of the ichthyosporean Chromosphaera perkinsii, a close cousin of animals. In red, the membranes and in blue the nuclei with their DNA. The image was obtained ...

Multicellular organisms (animals, plants, humans) all have the ability to methylate the cytosine base in their DNA. This process, a type of epigenetic modification, plays an important role in ...