One of the biggest quests in biology is understanding how every cell in an animal's body carries an identical genome yet still gives rise to a kaleidoscope of different cell types and tissues. A ...

The history of life stretches back untold eons. Today, there is a staggering array of organisms on Earth, with more species being discovered every year. The complexity of life, from the smallest ...

Early fossils with guts, segmented bodies and other sophisticated features reveal a revolution in animal life — before the Cambrian explosion. The revolutionary animal lived and died in the muck. In ...

Scientists had no idea what type of organisms the life forms of the Ediacaran were—lichen, colonies of bacteria, fungi or something else. It turns out, the key to solving the puzzle of Precambrian ...

The shoreline of Great Salt Lake in Utah often appears almost empty. Wide flats of salt-covered mud stretch toward shallow ...

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 ...