Scientists revealed first animal on Earth: For years, sea sponges were widely regarded by many scientists as the earliest animals to have evolved on Earth. But in 2009, a new analysis challenged that ...

Analyses of chromosome organization across diverse animals and non-animals provide evidence that a group of marine creatures called ctenophores, or comb jellies, are the sister clade of all other ...

We humans have long viewed ourselves as the pinnacle of evolution. People label other species as "primitive" or "ancient" and use terms like "higher" and "lower" animals. This anthropocentric ...

One of the biggest quests in biology is understanding how every cell in an animal's body carries an identical genome yet still gives rise to a kaleidoscope of different cell types and tissues. A ...

Phylogenomic analysis harnesses genome-scale data sets to reconstruct the deep branches of the animal tree of life, resolving longstanding debates about the relationships among major lineages such as ...