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 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 ...

A visualization of Tiktaalik roseae, an extinct aquatic animal with fossils that shed light on the evolution of land animals from marine animals millions of years ago. Nobu Tamura via Wikimedia ...

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 ...

A reconstruction of the Jiangchuan biota, an assemblage of early animals represented by fossils from a newly discovered fossil site in China?s Yunnan Province dating to about 554 to 539 million years ...

When the environment changes dramatically, animals from mollusks to crows can make big changes in their behavior that enable them to survive. For example, marmots and ground squirrels in California ...

Molecular clocks, which use the mutation rate of biomolecules to deduce how long ago two species diverged, and phylogenetics (the evolutionary relationships between species) can tell us when sea ...

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. The story of two of ...