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 ...

Some single-celled organisms are known to transition to multicellularity during their lifetimes, usually either by cloning themselves or when many similar cells come together to form a larger ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Researchers find that oxygenation of Earth's surface is key to the evolution of large, complex multicellular organisms. If cells can access oxygen, they get a big metabolic benefit. However, when ...

Researchers in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University have uncovered something new in one of the most studied organisms on Earth, and their ...

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 ...

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 ...