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 ...

A new study has pieced together the evolutionary history of terrestrial animals on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau (QTP), offering a comprehensive picture of how the distinctive fauna of the "Third Pole" ...

Paleorex is back on Bored Panda with his detailed, science-based creatures, showing us how animals like big cats, birds, and reptiles might evolve in the future. In this article, we’re featuring even ...

A sweeping analysis of thousands of animal genomes suggests that chromosomes do not evolve randomly but instead follow a limited number of irreversible “evolutionary highways.” These one-way genetic ...

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 ...

The Cambrian explosion may have been fueled by poop. The first animals on Earth emerged about 600 million years ago, and 60 million years later, those simple early animals evolved in wildly different ...

An international team of scientists has uncovered a fascinating piece of the evolutionary puzzle: how the ventral nerve cord, a key component of the central nervous system, evolved in ecdysozoan ...

(CNN) — The story of two of the strangest animals on the planet just got a little stranger, thanks to clues revealed by a lone fossil specimen that scientists now say represents a long-extinct ...

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 ...

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 ...