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

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 variety of studies are showing that rough-and-tumble play is important for animals and kids alike.

A biologist explains the surprising evolutionary math behind how the blue whale became the largest animal that has ever lived ...

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 ...

One of the biggest quests in biology is understanding how every cell in an animal's body carries an identical genome yet ...

Researchers find Apennine brown bears evolved into a smaller, less aggressive animal after centuries of coexistence with ...

A microorganism whose evolutionary roots can be traced to the era of the first multicellular animals may provide a glimpse of how single-celled organisms made a critical evolutionary leap. In ...

Animals across the natural world rely on a limited number of combat strategies when facing rivals or threats. Researchers have identified four primary combat styles that appear repeatedly across ...

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

Large blocks of genes conserved through hundreds of millions of years of evolution hint at how the first animal chromosomes came to be. Chromosomes, the bundles of DNA that star in the mitotic ballet ...

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 ...