It's also why Indiana University distinguished professor Rudolf (Rudy) Raff collects sea urchins from the Australian coast instead of ordering mice from the Jackson Laboratory or flies from the ...

Much of what scientists learn about the evolution of Earth's first animals will have to be gleaned from spherical embryos fossilized under very specific conditions, according to a new study by Indiana ...

With knowledge and humor, Raff relates the story of his personal and professional evolution as a scientist in this part-memoir, part-plea on behalf of the much-maligned sciences of today's political ...

Bacterial decay was once viewed as fossilization's mortal enemy, but new research suggests bacterial biofilms may have actually helped preserve the fossil record's most vulnerable stuff -- animal ...

The recent marriage of evolutionary biology with developmental biology has resulted in the birth of a new field, evolutionary developmental biology, or "evo-devo." Evo-devo scientists study the ...

Fossilised embryos dating back more than half a billion years have revealed that complex life emerged on Earth at least 10m years before the "Cambrian explosion", a momentous event which saw a sudden ...

A team of scientists from five countries examining fossil embryos that are more than 550 million years old have found evidence of cell differentiation. The findings are to be reported in the October ...