Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” So goes the famous dictum of Sherlock Holmes, echoed by paleobotanist C. Kevin Boyce in summarizing ...

DNA is the genetic code that provides the biological instructions for every living species, but not every bit of DNA helps the species survive. Some pieces of DNA are more like parasites, along for ...

These results help us understand how genomes evolved to become so complex ... non protein-coding bits of DNA are seen in varying amounts across all animals, plants, fungi, and protists, and how they ...

Fossilized claw tracks discovered in Australia show that the animal group that includes reptiles, mammals and birds formed earlier than expected ...

"In a family tree based on DNA data from living animals, branches will have different lengths reflecting the number of genetic changes along each branch segment. This does not depend on fossils, so it ...

Venom usage has evolved independently in at least 104 lineages among at least eight animal phyla, which highlights the remarkable ... with Candidates Among Plants, Fungi, Protists, Bacteria, and ...

This newfound understanding of natural evolution could pave the way for improved stem cell models and potentially combat diseases and aging. Animals and protists: What’s the difference? The difference ...

Protists, typically unicellular microscopic ... This finding showed the capability is truly ancestral and predated the evolution of animals themselves. “The findings of this very elegant body ...

In their quest to understand how microbial life developed into proto-animals, researchers spotted this incredible embryonic by closely observing ancient protist C. perkinsii. The team—lead by ...

perkinsii independently evolved similar developmental processes ... Perkins, is an ancestral species of protist. Diverging from the animal evolutionary line over a billion years ago, it provides ...

Later, animals – multicellular organisms – evolved, developing from a single cell ... perkinsii, an ancestral species of protist. This unicellular organism separated from the animal evolutionary line ...

The team looked to a recently discovered, distant relative of ours: Chromosphaera perkinsii, a unicellular protist ... seen in animals, or did similar things just so happen to evolve independently ...