In most cases, evolution is a pretty slow process, taking hundreds if not thousands of years—but when humans enter the picture, some animals have to evolve at light speed in order to survive in a ...

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 ...

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 upside-down jellyfish drifts in a shallow lagoon, rhythmically contracting its translucent bell. By night that beat drops ...

At first glance, this mammal looks like a horse gone terribly wrong. But, in reality, Chalicotherium is far from a botched ...

For almost two decades, scientists have debated whether sponges or comb jellies are the first animal lineage. Now some are ...

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 ...

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 ...

Ever wonder how and when animals swanned onto the evolutionary stage? When, where, and why did animals first appear? What were they like? Life has existed for much of Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history, ...

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 ...

Ronan the sea lion can dance to a lot of different songs, but there is something about “Boogie Wonderland,” by Earth, Wind and Fire that really gets her going. It didn’t take more than a few days for ...

Sphen and Magic, two male Gentoo penguins, recently made headlines when they ‘adopted’ an egg. Gentoos are closely related to Adélie penguins, the species Levick first observed in 1911. After the two ...