Duplicated genes that appear in every branch of the tree of life can provide us with insight into the evolution that occurred ...

Scientists call this speck LUCA — the Last Universal Common Ancestor. Since the concept of LUCA first emerged, it has ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. We see a bonobo parent carrying its baby piggyback in the tall grass. The closest living relatives of humans are the apes such as ...

Ancient duplicated genes are giving scientists their first real clues about what life was like before all life on Earth shared a common ancestor.

Tuna, salmon, mackerel. I’ve never looked at my afternoon sushi and wondered if it’s related to humans. So, I asked one of those friends named Thomas Siek. He’s a biological anthropologist at ...

Four billion years ago, Earth was violent, hot, and unstable. Yet new research suggests that by then, life had already reached a surprising level of complexity. At that time lived the last universal ...

Researchers describe a rare type of gene family, known as “universal paralogs”, that provides insight into evolutionary history predating the last universal common ancestor of all life. Detailed ...

All life on Earth shares a common ancestor that lived roughly four billion years ago. This so-called "last universal common ancestor" represents the ...

More than 1 million years before the early hominin known as Lucy was striding across the Afar region of Ethiopia, the lesser-known Ardipithecus ramidus roamed approximately the same area. Now, a team ...

Genus-level tree of modern mammals, all of which descended from a common ancestor, with some of Australia's odd marsupials like the platypus, kangaroo and koala among the earliest to diverge OrthoMaM ...