Cell transplant across the tree of life hints at how animals emerged (opens in new tab)

Ewen Callaway in Nature: More than a century ago, embryologist Hilde Mangold conducted a strange experiment that transformed biology. As a PhD student in the 1920s, she moved a lump of cells from embryos of one newt species into another. The transplanted cells caused a secondary ‘body axis’ to form in the host embryo, complete with…