The knotty sea spider, Pycnogonum litorale, is not actually a spider, but it does represent a significant early branch in the genetic family tree that includes spiders, as well as scorpions, ticks and ...

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 ...

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 ...

This has been quite the wild year in human evolution stories. Our relatives, living and extinct, got a lot of attention—from ...

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 ...

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 ...

Bar-Ilan University study shows that even jellyfish and sea anemones repair DNA during repose, underscoring the fact that a ...

In his new National Geographic series Pole to Pole, the actor ventures deep into the Amazon in search of creatures whose ...

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 ...

(CNN) — The story of two of the strangest animals on the planet just got a little stranger, thanks to clues revealed by a lone fossil specimen that scientists now say represents a long-extinct ...