An ancient, armored worm may be the key to unraveling the evolutionary history of a diverse collection of marine invertebrates. Discovered in China, a roughly 520-million-year-old fossil of the newly ...

"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." “It may be doubted,” Darwin wrote, “if there are any other animals which have played such an important ...

"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: Is evolution a gradual process or a punctuated one, ...

Ancient fossils have shed new light on a type of sea worm linking it to the time of an evolutionary explosion that gave rise to modern animal life. Researchers at Durham University, UK, and Northwest ...

One of Earth's most consequential bursts of biodiversity -- a 30-million-year period of explosive evolutionary changes spawning innumerable new species -- may have the most modest of creatures to ...

New research is shaking up our understanding of evolution by revealing that some species may not evolve gradually at all. Instead, scientists discovered that certain marine worms experienced an ...

Studying two highly divergent phyla of worms that contain numerous parasites that cause human and livestock diseases, the research group of Qi Zhou from the University of Vienna and Zhejiang ...

A representation of single-cell RNA sequencing data from two species of worms, C. elegans (left) and C. briggsae (right). Each point represents a single cell, arranged such that cells from the same ...

Experiments that showed a surprising persistence of sexiness in worms reveal how much we are still learning about the rules governing heritability, epigenetics and natural selection. Playing the ...