The oldest fossilised remains of complex animals appear suddenly in the fossil record, and as if from nowhere, in rocks that ...

In most narratives, the story of evolution is the story of organisms emerging from the ocean and eventually populating the land. But for some species that evolution also involved a return trip. Dozens ...

In most cases, evolution is a pretty slow process, taking hundreds if not thousands of years—but when humans enter the ...

With copper-blue blood prized by modern medicine and a body plan older than dinosaurs, the horseshoe crab reveals how ancient ...

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 ...

Evolution doesn’t always move inextricably forward, instead sometimes taking the occasional detour or even getting stuck in never-ending circles. In Madison, Wisconsin’s Lake Mendota, bacteria evolves ...

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 ...

Some animals perform roles so specialized they resemble full-time jobs. This video explores species whose survival depends on ...

The origins of consciousness date back about 540 million years ago, when animal bodies became more complex. Feelings like ...

Walk into consciousness labs, and you will mostly find studies on humans relying on verbal reports. This evidence is then ...

How do animal behavior researchers feel about the feelings of animals? A new survey helps to answer that question. The journal Royal Society Open Science published a survey of 100 researchers of ...