Why did multicellularity arise? Solving that mystery may help pinpoint life on other planets and explain the vast diversity and complexity seen on Earth today, from sea sponges to redwoods to human ...

A major event in the evolution of organisms on earth was the development of complex, multicellular life forms made of eukaryotic cells, which are thought to have come from prokaryotic cells. Studies ...

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 ...

Life’s leap from single-celled to multicellular organisms marks a pivotal moment in evolutionary history. This transformation laid the foundation for the complex life forms we see today. By studying ...

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 ...

All the living things that we can see evolved from those that we can’t. Every human, bird, tree, and flower can trace its ancestry across a few billion years back to microscopic, single-celled ...

A new study by researchers at the University of Queensland is calling old ideas about evolution into question. The scientists used powerful genetic technologies to sequence every gene being expressed ...

A new study shows that multicelled organisms like the metazoan daphnia (pictured) require a tenfold increase in energy compared with protists for their growth, maintenance and survival. The high cost ...

A team of researchers with Oncode Institute, Hubrecht Institute-KNAW and University Medical Center Utrecht in The Netherlands has developed a new method to conduct whole-organism clone tracing using ...

Scaling up from one cell to many may have been a small step rather than a giant leap for early life on Earth. A single-celled organism closely related to animals controls its life cycle using a ...

Images of the multicellular development of the ichthyosporean Chromosphaera perkinsii, a close cousin of animals. In red, the membranes and in blue the nuclei with their DNA. The image was obtained ...

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 ...