New research shows that the earliest sponges were soft bodied and lacked skeletons, explaining why their oldest fossils are ...

"This book was originally published as an issue of Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society B; Biological sciences (volume 363; number 1496) but has been materially changed and updated"--Title ...

For over a century, scientists have wrestled with one of biology’s most fundamental mysteries: how the first animals evolved. These earliest creatures emerged more than 600 million years ago in ...

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 ...

Researchers have shed new light on the features that enable tree-dwelling mammals to move effectively through their ...

We humans have long viewed ourselves as the pinnacle of evolution. People label other species as "primitive" or "ancient" and use terms like "higher" and "lower" animals. This anthropocentric ...

Tree genome evolution is a fascinating area in the study of biodiversity and ecosystem stability. Trees, with their distinctive life history traits, such as ...