Over 600 million years ago, animals evolved from a unicellular or colonial organism whose
cell (s) captured bacteria with a collar complex, a flagellum surrounded by a microvillar …

Abstract The 'Cambrian Explosion'describes the rapid increase in animal diversity and
abundance, as manifest in the fossil record, between~ 540 and 520 million years ago (Ma) …

A new theory about the origins of consciousness that finds learning to be the driving force in
the evolutionary transition to basic consciousness. What marked the evolutionary transition …

The evolutionary emergence of animals is one of the most significant episodes in the history
of life, but its timing remains poorly constrained. Molecular clocks estimate that animals …

Which genomic innovations underpinned the origin of multicellular animals is still an open
debate. Here, we investigate this question by reconstructing the genome architecture and …

The evolutionary trajectory of early complex life on Earth is interpreted largely from the
fossils of the Precambrian soft-bodied Ediacara Biota, which appeared and evolved during a …

Deuterostomes are the major division of animal life which includes sea stars, acorn worms,
and humans, among a wide variety of ecologically and morphologically disparate taxa …

Animals make up only a small fraction of the eukaryotic tree of life, yet, from our vantage
point as members of the animal kingdom, the evolution of the bewildering diversity of animal …

Evolving multicellularity is easy, especially in phototrophs and osmotrophs whose multicells
feed like unicells. Evolving animals was much harder and unique; probably only one …

Osteoarthritis (OA) has long been viewed as a degenerative disease of cartilage, but
accumulating evidence indicates that inflammation has a critical role in its pathogenesis. In …