The Many Origins

The picture

The bush.

Every dot below is one independent origin of multicellularity — a separate lineage that, somewhere along its line of descent, made the move from single-celled ancestors to many cells acting as one organism. None of them inherited the trick from any of the others. Click any dot for the mechanism, the dates, and the primary literature.

Clonal — cells stayed attached after dividing
Aggregative — separate cells come together
Mixed / not multicellular in the strict sense
Complex  ·  Simple-to-complex  ·  Simple
BACTERIA ≥ 4 origins, oldest predates breathable air Cyanobacteria (filamentous) Streptomyces Myxobacteria Biofilms (single-species, strict cases) ARCHAEA 1–2 origins, both confirmed within the last 3 years Actinoarchaeum halophilum (haloarchaeon) Haloarchaeon (compression-induced tissue) EUKARYOTES 16–25 conservative · 45 inventoried (Lamża) · ~100 projected Opisthokonta Animals (Metazoa) Dikarya fungi Fonticula alba Amoebozoa Dictyostelid slime moulds Copromyxa Excavata Acrasid slime moulds Archaeplastida Land plants (Embryophyta) Red algae (Rhodophyta) Volvocine green algae SAR Brown algae (Phaeophyceae) Sorogena (ciliate) Guttulinopsis (cercozoan) Sorodiplophrys (stramenopile)

The counts in the headline come from the explainer's Chapter 1, Part 5 (Lamża–Knoll crosswalk). The dots shown here are the well-attested cases that appear in Chapter 1's prose — about 19 of the 45 eukaryotic origins inventoried by Lamża (2023), plus the bacterial and archaeal cases. Adding more is an editorial task; the underlying data lives in data/polyphyly-tree.yaml.

→ Read Chapter 1  ·  View bibliography