Once upon a time, there were a bunch of one-celled microbes, swimming, eating, reproducing, doing all the things that a one-cell bit of life can do. Then, some time later, there were their descendants ...

Bite force, a measure of the strength of an animal's bite, helps researchers understand a species' role in the ecosystem.

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 ...

One of the biggest quests in biology is understanding how every cell in an animal's body carries an identical genome yet ...

In most cases, evolution is a pretty slow process, taking hundreds if not thousands of years—but when humans enter the ...

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 ...

Environmental change doesn’t affect evolution in a single, predictable way. In large-scale computer simulations, scientists ...

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 variety of studies are showing that rough-and-tumble play is important for animals and kids alike.

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 ...

Researchers find Apennine brown bears evolved into a smaller, less aggressive animal after centuries of coexistence with ...

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 ...