In a remarkable development, scientists at Tufts University and the University of Vermont have created a new biological organism that can self-replicate. The discovery builds on earlier work creating ...

Scientists have discovered the fossil of what may be the earliest multicellular animal ever found. Dating back a billion years, the microscopic fossil contains two distinct cell types, potentially ...

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 ...

The oldest trace fossils of a multicellular organism's movement were found in 2.1-billion-year-old strata in Gabon. It is presumed to have moved in search of food. Photo courtesy of PNAS Fossilized ...

MIT geochemists offer compelling evidence that ancient sea sponges were Earth's first animals, emerging over 541 million years ago. By analysing chemical fossils in rocks, researchers identified ...

No, oxygen didn't catalyze the swift blossoming of Earth's first multicellular organisms. The result defies a 70-year-old assumption about what caused an explosion of oceanic fauna hundreds of ...

Top row: co-first authors Ang Gao (left) and Krishna Shrinivas (right). Bottom row: co-senior authors Arup Chakraborty (left) and Phillip Sharp (right). A computational model developed by scientists ...

The first large, multicellular organisms seem to have appeared on Earth a billion years earlier than we thought – and their evolution may have been driven by a surge in oxygen. Until recently, the ...

Bacteria may have helped single-celled organisms make the leap to multicellular animals. For billions of years, single-celled creatures had the planet to themselves, floating through the oceans in ...

For decades, scientists have debated which animals first appeared on Earth and set the stage for the evolution of complex life. A recent study by MIT geochemists offers compelling evidence that the ...