Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Once upon a time, there were a bunch of one-celled microbes, swimming, eating, reproducing, doing all the things that a one-cell ...

Animals, from worms and sponges to jellyfish and whales, contain anywhere from a few thousand to tens of trillions of nearly genetically identical cells. Depending on the organism, these cells arrange ...

Paleobiologist Geerat Vermeij is enthralled with mollusks. Their shells line the surfaces and fill the cabinets and drawers in his office on the second floor of the Earth and Planetary Sciences ...

Evolution is a continuous, powerful force shaping the natural world around us. As environmental pressures intensify, future animal evolution is likely to produce fascinating and sometimes bizarre new ...

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

(CNN) — The story of two of the strangest animals on the planet just got a little stranger, thanks to clues revealed by a lone fossil specimen that scientists now say represents a long-extinct ...

For more than 500 million years, sea creatures have been getting bigger — much bigger as it turns out, according to a study by scientists who say that the evolutionary trend toward larger body size ...

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 ...

An artist’s impression depicts Kryoryctes at Dinosaur Cove in Australia. New research supports the hypothesis that Kryoryctes is a common ancestor of both the platypus and echidna. - Peter Schouten ...