Fern-like bodies once covered the seafloor, some stretching as tall as a person. Yet for millions of years, the animal world ...

The way that Earth's first animals reproduced held back life's diversity for millions of years, until stress and competition ...

Scientists say Earth's earliest animals reproduced by cloning themselves, a strategy that limited competition and slowed ...

For millions of years, some of Earth’s earliest animals barely changed. They lived, grew, and spread across the seafloor, but ...

The Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) forms part of an international consortium that is preparing the Tree of Sex project, an ambitious initiative aimed at decoding the evolutionary complexity ...

In flowering plants, the transition from cross-fertilization (outcrossing) to self-fertilization has evolved repeatedly across species. This shift is often accompanied by a well-known set of traits ...

A study has found that the reason why the evolution of the first animals to appear on Earth was delayed for over 10 million ...

Scientists suggest Earth's earliest animals reproduced asexually, slowing evolution and delaying the biodiversity boom that ...

Sexual reproduction is ubiquitous in eukaryotes, but the mechanisms by which sex is determined are diverse and undergo rapid turnovers in short evolutionary timescales. Usually, an embryo’s sex is ...

Large diversifications of species are known to occur unevenly across space and evolutionary lineages, but the relative importance of their driving mechanisms, such as climate, ecological opportunity ...

Stick insects that reproduce asexually cannot adapt as quickly in the course of evolution as sexually reproducing species, leading to a decrease in biological diversity, according to new research. An ...