{"id":186940,"date":"2024-04-07T06:23:40","date_gmt":"2024-04-07T11:23:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/04\/scientists-discover-unusual-third-path-to-multicellular-lifeforms"},"modified":"2024-04-07T06:23:40","modified_gmt":"2024-04-07T11:23:40","slug":"scientists-discover-unusual-third-path-to-multicellular-lifeforms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/04\/scientists-discover-unusual-third-path-to-multicellular-lifeforms","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Discover \u2018Unusual\u2019 Third Path to Multicellular Lifeforms"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/scientists-discover-unusual-third-path-to-multicellular-lifeforms3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Just when <a href=\"https:\/\/www.quantamagazine.org\/scientists-debate-the-origin-of-cell-types-in-the-first-animals-20190717\/\">scientists thought<\/a> they had <a href=\"https:\/\/www.science.org\/content\/article\/momentous-transition-multicellular-life-may-not-have-been-so-hard-after-all\">almost figured out<\/a> the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/we-might-finally-know-what-the-very-first-animals-looked-like\">origins of multicellular life<\/a>, evolution throws another curveball.<\/p>\n<p>In a serendipitous discovery, a team of researchers has just chanced upon a third type of \u2018unconventional\u2019 multicellularity that blends the two kinds we already knew about.<\/p>\n<p>Multicellularity has evolved a<a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1111\/brv.13001\"> staggering 45 times<\/a> or more across the tree of life. Yet fundamentally, the ancestor of each multicellular lineage relied on just one of two methods \u2014 individual cells sticking together as they split, or individual cells that have previously split coming back together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just when scientists thought they had almost figured out the origins of multicellular life, evolution throws another curveball. In a serendipitous discovery, a team of researchers has just chanced upon a third type of \u2018unconventional\u2019 multicellularity that blends the two kinds we already knew about. Multicellularity has evolved a staggering 45 times or more across [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":367,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,385],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biological","category-evolution"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/367"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186940"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186940\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}