The world would look very different without multicellular organisms – take away the plants, animals, fungi, and seaweed, and Earth starts to look like a wetter, greener version of Mars. But precisely ...

Paleontologists have found fossilized multicellular marine algae, or seaweed, dating back more than 555 million years, ranking among the oldest examples of multicellular life on Earth. Honing in on ...

Cells can evolve specialized functions under a much broader range of conditions than previously thought, according to a study. Cells can evolve specialised functions under a much broader range of ...

The origin of animal multicellularity is one of the major evolutionary transitions in the history of life. The identification and phylogenetic classification of the closest unicellular relatives of ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

In multicellular organisms, there is a potential risk that cheating mutants gain access to the germline. Development from a single-celled zygote resets relatedness among cells to its maximum value ...

Humanity can’t even figure out how to cryogenically freeze a single person for a short period of time. (Though NASA and Dippin’ Dots are both on the case.) But evolution has nailed keeping things ...

Until one or two billion years ago, life on Earth was limited to a soup of single-celled creatures. Then one fateful day, a lonely cell surrendered solitude for communal living. It developed a chance ...

Over 3,000 generations of laboratory evolution, Georgia Tech researchers watched as their model organism, “snowflake yeast,” began to adapt as multicellular individuals. catherine.barzler@gatech.edu ...

Honing in on when life on Earth evolved from single-celled to multicellular organisms is no easy task. Organisms that old lacked many distinguishing characteristics of modern life forms, making their ...