Researchers uncovered millions of ancient plant DNA switches—some older than flowering plants themselves—revealing a hidden evolutionary blueprint stretching back 400 million years. Most people have ...

A study has traced thousands of conserved regulatory elements back 300 million years, revealing deep principles of plant genome evolution—a discovery that could pave the way for more precise ...

In Lake Malawi, hundreds of species of cichlid fish have evolved with astonishing speed, offering scientists a rare opportunity to study how biodiversity arises.

The story of life’s beginnings gets stranger when you look closely at viruses. These tiny entities seem to sit at the edge of ...

A giant DNA virus pulled from a Japanese freshwater pond is forcing scientists to rethink how complex cells first acquired their defining feature: the nucleus. Named ushikuvirus, the newly ...

A deep genetic mystery has baffled plant scientists for decades. Although leaves, stems, and flowers develop in strikingly similar ways across many ...

Most people alive today carry fragments of Neanderthal DNA in their genome. Now scientists are gaining a more intimate ...

Scientists at the University of Vienna, Austria, have screened great ape specimens obtained from natural history museums to identify DNA viruses. This groundbreaking study provides unique insights ...

FILE: Reconstructions of a Neanderthal man, left, and woman at the Neanderthal museum in Mettmann, Germany, March 2009 ...

Scientists may have a step forward in understanding how life on our planet came to exist. The mystery of how tiny molecules of RNA came to be enclosed within membranes, forming the very first cells, ...

SALT LAKE CITY - Evolution is often thought of as a gradual remodeling of the genome, the genetic blueprints for building an organism. In some instances it might be more appropriate to call it an ...