Known as the Cambrian Explosion, this flurry of rapid evolution produced most of the animal phyla and ecosystems we see around us today. And it may have taken off because some of those early animals ...

Humans have become one of the world's greatest evolutionary forces. To survive our cities, animals from urban foxes to glass-climbing lizards are responding with extreme adaptation.

Evolution, a new five-part series tells the extraordinary story of how life on Earth has changed over more than four billion years. Using cutting‑edge science and immersive visu ...

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 ...

In most narratives, the story of evolution is the story of organisms emerging from the ocean and eventually populating the land. But for some species, that evolution also involved a return trip.

An international team of scientists has uncovered a fascinating piece of the evolutionary puzzle: how the ventral nerve cord, a key component of the central nervous system, evolved in ecdysozoan ...

As all children learn, everyone poos. But when did this begin? And what evolutionary and environmental changes accompanied ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Once upon a time, there were a bunch of one-celled microbes, swimming, eating, reproducing, doing all the things that a one-cell ...

A huge and beautifully preserved suite of fossils discovered in China has cast doubt on the idea that complex life flourished dramatically during a rapid burst of evolution known as the Cambrian ...

Researchers funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) at the University of Oxford have uncovered a clue that may help to explain why the earliest evidence of complex ...

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 ...