The last 40 years have witnessed a deep transformation in our views of animal development. From seeing development a multicellular black box where over time a mass of cells acquires shape to form ...

The embryos of many species can stop developing when starved of nutrients, only to restart the process once these are restored – and scientists may have figured out how they do it. In the early stages ...

New research combines microscope and video technology to analyze how different species develop, and how changes in the timings of any developments can be tracked. A detailed analysis of the Energy ...

An international research team has made a notable discovery of fossil embryos belonging to Ecdysozoa, a diverse group of animals including roundworms, velvet worms, insects, and crabs. These fossils, ...

The annual killifish lives in regions with extreme drought. A research group now reports that the early embryogenesis of killifish diverges from that of other species. Unlike other fish, their body ...

Some newly reported clumps of cells growing in lab dishes have been hailed as the closest things to human embryos that scientists have ever made in the lab. These entities are human embryo models — ...

For nearly three days after a sperm meets an egg, the human embryo (a tiny, eight-cell blob) is managed by the egg’s genes. On day three, the embryo strips its entire genome naked, freeing itself of ...

Learn how microgravity could affect sperm, fertilization, and embryonic development in space.