The world would look very different without multicellular organisms – take away the plants, animals, fungi, and seaweed, and Earth starts to look like a wetter, greener version of Mars. But precisely ...

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 ...

Cells can evolve specialized functions under a much broader range of conditions than previously thought, according to a study. Cells can evolve specialised functions under a much broader range of ...

The origin of animal multicellularity is one of the major evolutionary transitions in the history of life. The identification and phylogenetic classification of the closest unicellular relatives of ...

Top row: co-first authors Ang Gao (left) and Krishna Shrinivas (right). Bottom row: co-senior authors Arup Chakraborty (left) and Phillip Sharp (right). A computational model developed by scientists ...

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 ...

Until one or two billion years ago, life on Earth was limited to a soup of single-celled creatures. Then one fateful day, a lonely cell surrendered solitude for communal living. It developed a chance ...

Researchers find that oxygenation of Earth's surface is key to the evolution of large, complex multicellular organisms. If cells can access oxygen, they get a big metabolic benefit. However, when ...

Researchers have discovered that environments favoring clumpy growth are all that’s needed to quickly transform single-celled yeast into complex multicellular organisms. To human eyes, the dominant ...

Scaling up from one cell to many may have been a small step rather than a giant leap for early life on Earth. A single-celled organism closely related to animals controls its life cycle using a ...

Humanity can’t even figure out how to cryogenically freeze a single person for a short period of time. (Though NASA and Dippin’ Dots are both on the case.) But evolution has nailed keeping things ...