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 ...

For some three billion years, unicellular organisms ruled Earth. Then, around one billion years ago, a new chapter of life began. Early attempts at team living began to stick, paving the way for the ...

Chromosphaera perkinsii is a single-celled species discovered in 2017 in marine sediments around Hawaii. The first signs of its presence on Earth have been dated at over a billion years, well before ...

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) — a class of small RNAs with a role in the regulation of gene expression — had until now been found only in multicellular organisms. Now, Wang, Qi and colleagues provide the first ...

At some point, organisms changed and grew from a single cell into one made up of many cells. But how that happened is not well understood. New work by graduate candidate Jonathan Featherston of the ...

One of the biggest evolutionary hurdles for life on Earth was the jump from single-celled to multi-cellular organisms…or at least, that’s what we thought. Scientists set out to replicate this ...

Groundbreaking fossils unearthed in China suggest that multicellular organisms arose earlier than scientists previously thought. The fossils, of what may be an ancient type of photosynthetic alga, are ...

A team of scientists, led by the University of Sheffield in the UK and Boston College in the U.S., has found a microfossil in the Scottish Highlands which contains two distinct cell types and could be ...

In the multicellular soil bacterium Streptomyces coelicolor, some cells start producing lots of antibiotics after mutations delete big chunks of their genomes. Now a computer model has helped to ...

The global positioning system (GPS) can keep you from getting lost, manage air traffic, and track the migration of endangered species. And in a new study published today by Nature, it’s helped ...

Images of the multicellular development of the ichthyosporean Chromosphaera perkinsii, a close cousin of animals. In red, the membranes and in blue the nuclei with their DNA. The image was obtained ...