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 ...

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 ...

A variety of studies are showing that rough-and-tumble play is important for animals and kids alike.

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 ...

A biologist explains the surprising evolutionary math behind how the blue whale became the largest animal that has ever lived ...

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 ...

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 ...

Researchers find Apennine brown bears evolved into a smaller, less aggressive animal after centuries of coexistence with ...

Large blocks of genes conserved through hundreds of millions of years of evolution hint at how the first animal chromosomes came to be. Chromosomes, the bundles of DNA that star in the mitotic ballet ...

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 ...