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 ...

For a billion years, single-celled eukaryotes ruled the planet. Then around 700 million years ago during Snowball Earth—a geologic era when glaciers may have stretched as far as the Equator—a new ...

New studies by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology show that competition between different evolutionary developmental stages of multicellular life cycles can be important for the ...

This article was originally featured on The Conversation. Life and death are traditionally viewed as opposites. But the emergence of new multicellular life-forms from the cells of a dead organism ...

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

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 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 ...

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 ...

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

In the multicellular soil bacterium Streptomyces coelicolor, some cells start producing lots of antibiotics after mutations delete big chunks of their genomes. Now a computer model has helped to ...

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 ...

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 ...