A human, an octopus, and a coral could hardly look more different—yet deep inside their cells, their chromosomes still carry ...

How has offspring dependence on parents evolved over the course of evolution? Researchers at the University of Bayreuth, in ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 most narratives, the story of evolution is the story of organisms emerging from the ocean and eventually populating the land. But for some species, that evolution also involved a return trip.

Small really does seem to be beautiful in evolutionary terms. The largest dinosaurs, pterosaurs and mammals may look impressive but these giants are vastly outnumbered by microscopic bacteria and ...

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 ...

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 ...