Interest in the ecology, biology and evolution of amphioxus is growing, and the availability of several species is helping to improve our understanding of chordate evolution.

The turquoise killifish from ephemeral pools in African savannah combines extremely short lifespan with a standard vertebrate body plan – ideal attributes for a laboratory animal.

A phylogeny of all major groups of flatworms based on hundreds of genes sheds new light the early evolution of this important metazoan phylum, with particular significance for the original of vertebrate parasitism.

Three-dimensional cell modelling, lipid analysis, transcriptomics, and live-cell imaging reveal biological insights in to the key stages of the chytrid fungus life cycle.

Quantitative system-level analysis of a pattern-forming gene regulatory network in a non-model organism shows that dynamic changes in gene expression evolve through quantitative system drift.

The nature and extent of developmental variation seen between mouse strains and genetically identical individuals explain why the first upper molar evolves along preferred path in murine rodents.

The distributions of cellular neighborhood volumes in two very different multicellular species - snowflake yeast and Volvox carteri - are found to obey a common functional form arising from maximum entropy consideration, despite great differences in their cell division processes.

Mathematical modeling shows that reproductive specialization is strongly favored in sparse networks of cellular interactions that reflect the morphology of early multicellular organisms, even when benefits of specialization are saturating.

This review considers the evolutionary processes and physiological mechanisms that maintain or end pregnancy in mammals to formulate general, testable theoretical models that provide insights into the biology of parturition.