Only a handful of molecules and mechanisms can generate such a huge diversity of forms and complexity in multicellular organisms. Recently, researchers investigated how this is possible using a simple ...

Over 3,000 generations of laboratory evolution, researchers watched as their model organism, 'snowflake yeast,' began to adapt as multicellular individuals. In new research, the team shows how ...

Some single-celled organisms are known to transition to multicellularity during their lifetimes, usually either by cloning ...

A billion-year-old fossil discovered in the Scottish Highlands may provide the "missing link" in how animals evolved. That "missing link" is the bridge between the transition of a single-celled ...

Scientists have long thought that there was a direct connection between the rise in atmospheric oxygen, which started with the Great Oxygenation Event 2.5 billion years ago, and the rise of large, ...

Scientists have discovered the fossil of what may be the earliest multicellular animal ever found. Dating back a billion years, the microscopic fossil contains two distinct cell types, potentially ...

Horodyskia, characterized by a string of beads with uniform size and spacing, is a kind of macroscopic fossil with a record extending from the early Mesoproterozoic Era (~1.48 Ga) to the terminal ...

Life and death are traditionally viewed as opposites. But the emergence of new multicellular life-forms from the cells of a dead organism introduces a “third state” that lies beyond the traditional ...

A team of scientists, led by the University of Sheffield in the UK and Boston College in the U.S., has found a microfossil in the Scottish Highlands which contains two distinct cell types and could be ...

Unicellular organisms show surprising complexity In a paper appearing in Nature Genetics, researchers discover that in more "primitive" unicellular organisms, both the adenine and the cytosine bases ...

How do living organisms that lack a brain or nerve cells make decisions? In a new study published in May 2021 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America ...