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 ...

New research shows that the earliest sponges were soft bodied and lacked skeletons, explaining why their oldest fossils are ...

A series of whole genome and gene duplication events that go back hundreds of millions of years have laid the foundations for tissue-specific gene expression, according to a new study. The 'copy-paste ...

This article was originally featured on High Country News. Increasing frequent and intense fires are shaping how species change, according to a paper published last year in the journal Trends in ...

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 ...

Fast-moving animals process visual information at higher speeds, reshaping how they hunt, escape predators, and experience ...

Researchers funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) at the University of Oxford have uncovered a clue that may help to explain why the earliest evidence of complex ...

A new study tracing the evolution of same-sex sexual behavior in mammals, using phylogenetic analyses, suggests these behaviors may have evolved in part to strengthen social bonding and relationships.

A University of Montpellier study published on September 1st in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported that human intervention over the last millennium drove a sharp divergence ...