Once upon a time, there were a bunch of one-celled microbes, swimming, eating, reproducing, doing all the things that a one-cell bit of life can do. Then, some time later, there were their descendants ...

A new study theorizes that evolution ticks at different speeds, especially when a big group of organisms first appears.

Earth’s first sponges may have been ghostly, soft-bodied pioneers—ancient animals that evolved long before their skeletons ...

Evolution is often perceived as an incredibly slow, natural process driven by environmental pressures over millennia. That characterization certainly holds true, but humans have also repeatedly ...

This has been quite the wild year in human evolution stories. Our relatives, living and extinct, got a lot of attention—from ...

In five cases where vertebrates evolved monogamy, the same changes in gene expression occurred each time. In many non-monogamous species, females provide all or most of the offspring care. In ...

An international team of scientists has uncovered a fascinating piece of the evolutionary puzzle: how the ventral nerve cord, a key component of the central nervous system, evolved in ecdysozoan ...

The peppered moth is an iconic example of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. For centuries peppered moths (Biston betularia) were common in the forests around Manchester, ...

To understand the origins of multicelled life, researchers are studying a motley assortment of simpler animal relatives. The commonalities they’re unearthing offer a trove of clues about our mutual ...