This tree, from 1997, is the work of Norman Pace of the University of Colorado. One branch was our own, the eukaryotes. This branch includes animals, plants, fungi, and protozoans. Eukaryotes ...

(Any eukaryotic lineages that lack mitochondria used to have them and then lost them sometime in evolutionary history.) And across the evolutionary tree, different eukaryotes have evolved or procured ...

His approach to the top of the tree (home to eukaryotes, which wrap their DNA in membrane-bound cell nuclei) would rule biology classrooms for decades. Yet his system is based only partly on ...

thanks to a new study that redefines what it means to belong to our limb on the tree of life. That limb includes all eukaryotes, multi-celled organisms and more complex single-celled organisms ...

Lucy Reading-Ikkanda/Quanta Magazine To understand how evolutionarily distinct the hemimastigote lineage is, imagine the eukaryotic tree splayed out before you on the ground as a narrowing set of ...

Some scientists have looked for clues within eukaryotes, trying to draw their evolutionary tree. The deepest branches might be more primitive than newer ones, not having acquired the full ...

It is best considered a member of a previously undescribed, entirely extinct group of eukaryotes,” the team wrote in the study paper. This challenges our understanding of the tree of life itself.

“This is the most exciting and important paper on big questions about eukaryotic origins and the tree of life in years,” said evolutionary biologist Jeffrey Palmer of Indiana University, Bloomington, ...

However, it is unclear how frequent these habitat transitions have been across the eukaryotic tree of life, which comprises animals, plants, as well as a dazzling array of microbial diversity that ...

The question of where exactly eukaryotes branch on the tree of life has been debated by scientists for decades. But the discovery of the Asgard archaea—the closest prokaryotic relatives to modern ...