The world would look very different without multicellular organisms—take away the plants, animals, fungi, and seaweed, and Earth starts to look like a wetter, greener version of Mars. But precisely ...

Horodyskia, characterized by a string of beads with uniform size and spacing, is a kind of macroscopic fossil with a record extending from the early Mesoproterozoic Era (~1.48 Ga) to the terminal ...

A team of scientists, led by the University of Sheffield in the UK and Boston College in the U.S., has found a microfossil in the Scottish Highlands which contains two distinct cell types and could be ...

A deep dive into macroalgae genetics has uncovered the genetic underpinnings that enabled macroalgae, or 'seaweed,' to evolve multicellularity. Three lineages of macroalgae developed multicellularity ...

For some three billion years, unicellular organisms ruled Earth. Then, around one billion years ago, a new chapter of life began. Early attempts at team living began to stick, paving the way for the ...

Life’s leap from single-celled to multicellular organisms marks a pivotal moment in evolutionary history. This transformation laid the foundation for the complex life forms we see today. By studying ...

Chromosphaera perkinsii is a single-celled species discovered in 2017 in marine sediments around Hawaii. The first signs of its presence on Earth have been dated at over a billion years, well before ...

A giant, trumpet-shaped cell that skulks in the bottom of ponds has given scientists a new clue about how single-celled creatures may have taken the first steps towards evolving into multicellular ...

In the multicellular soil bacterium Streptomyces coelicolor, some cells start producing lots of antibiotics after mutations delete big chunks of their genomes. Now a computer model has helped to ...

Individuality is a complex trait, yet a series of stages each advantageous in itself can be shown to exist allowing evolution to get from unicellular individuals to multicellular individuals. We ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American Bacterial cells are fundamentally different ...