"By following universal paralogs," says Kaçar, "we can connect the earliest steps of life on Earth to the tools of modern ...

Living organisms share an ancestor called the last universal common ancestor, or LUCA. LUCA is estimated to have lived ...

Every organism alive on Earth, from oak trees to octopuses to the bacteria in our gut, belongs to a single extended family. Genetic evidence points back to one ancestral cell, a last common forebear ...

Scientists call this speck LUCA — the Last Universal Common Ancestor. Since the concept of LUCA first emerged, it has ...

Ancient duplicated genes are giving scientists their first real clues about what life was like before all life on Earth ...

Life’s story may stretch further back than scientists once thought. Some genes found in nearly every organism today were already duplicated before all life shared a common ancestor. By tracking these ...

"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: All life on Earth can be traced back to a Last ...

Every mammal that is found on our planet is descended from one common ancestor, thought to have lived around 180 million years ago. Although there is a lot we do not yet know about this animal, ...

All life on Earth shares a common ancestor that lived roughly four billion years ago. This so-called "last universal common ...

From the small ossicones of a giraffe to the gigantic antlers of a moose, all these distinct headgears evolved from the same ancestor but are dramatically different in size and shape due to ...

Every modern mammal, from a platypus to a blue whale, is descended from a common ancestor that lived about 180 million years ago. We don’t know a great deal about this animal, but the organization of ...

An international team has reconstructed the genome organization of the earliest common ancestor of all mammals. The reconstructed ancestral genome could help in understanding the evolution of mammals ...