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 ...

Animals, from worms and sponges to jellyfish and whales, contain anywhere from a few thousand to tens of trillions of nearly genetically identical cells. Depending on the organism, these cells arrange ...

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 ...

Chromosphaera perkinsii is a single-celled species discovered in 2017 in marine sediments around Hawaii. The first signs of its presence on Earth have been dated at over a billion years, well before ...

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 ...

The evolution of multicellularity represents one of the most consequential transitions in the history of life. This process, in which individual cells coalesce to form integrated and functionally ...

Foreword : the evolution of multicellularity / John Tyler Bonner -- I. Functional and molecular predispositions to multicellularity. Fossils, feeding, and the evolution of complex multicellularity / ...

Animals, from worms and sponges to jellyfish and whales, contain anywhere from a few thousand to tens of trillions of nearly genetically identical cells. Depending on the organism, these cells arrange ...

Scientists at Nagoya University in Japan have identified the genes that allow an organism to switch between living as single ...

In a groundbreaking experiment, researchers have brought a mouse to life with the help of a single-celled organism that existed long before any multicellular animals walked the earth. Genetic research ...

Pictured is an early planula larval stage of the sea anemone Aiptasia (cyan nuclei and green stinging cells) preying on a crustacean nauplius (green) of the copepod Tisbe sp. Were the first animals ...