A 400-million-year-old jawed fish fossil found in the Arctic, Romundina gagnieri, could be a key link in the evolution of ...

For almost two decades, scientists have debated whether sponges or comb jellies are the first animal lineage. Now some are ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

An upside-down jellyfish drifts in a shallow lagoon, rhythmically contracting its translucent bell. By night that beat drops ...

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 ...

Ronan the sea lion can dance to a lot of different songs, but there is something about “Boogie Wonderland,” by Earth, Wind and Fire that really gets her going. It didn’t take more than a few days for ...

Evolution is often perceived as an incredibly slow, natural process driven by environmental pressures over millennia. That characterization certainly holds true, but humans have also repeatedly ...

About 99 percent of species who ever lived have become extinct. Of the 7.7 million species of animals that exist today, most are still around because they have adapted to a changing planet. Yet there ...

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 ...

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 ...