Animals make up only a small fraction of the eukaryotic tree of life, yet, from our vantage point as members of the animal kingdom, the evolution of the bewildering diversity of animal …
The rise of complex macroscopic life occurred during the Ediacaran Period, an interval that witnessed large-scale disturbances to biogeochemical systems. The current Ediacaran …
A new theory about the origins of consciousness that finds learning to be the driving force in the evolutionary transition to basic consciousness. What marked the evolutionary transition …
Sponges (phylum Porifera) are early-diverging metazoa renowned for establishing complex microbial symbioses. Here we present a global Porifera microbiome survey, set out to …
The timing of divergences among metazoan lineages is integral to understanding the processes of animal evolution, placing the biological events of species divergences into the …
How consciousness appeared much earlier in evolutionary history than is commonly assumed, and why all vertebrates and perhaps even some invertebrates are conscious …
Sponges are the oldest known extant animal-microbe symbiosis. These ubiquitous benthic animals play an important role in marine ecosystems in the cycling of dissolved organic …
The dichotomy between high microbial abundance (HMA) and low microbial abundance (LMA) sponges has been observed in sponge-microbe symbiosis, although the extent of this …
T Cavalier-Smith - … Transactions of the Royal Society B …, 2017 - royalsocietypublishing.org
Evolving multicellularity is easy, especially in phototrophs and osmotrophs whose multicells feed like unicells. Evolving animals was much harder and unique; probably only one …