Two related studies led by scientists at Harvard and Stanford, also published Aug. 28 in the same issue of the journal Nature, tell a similar story: Even though humans, worms, and flies bear little obvious similarity to each other, evolution used remarkably similar molecular toolkits to shape them.

However, the same Yale lab reports in a separate paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences dramatic differences between species in genomic regions populated by pseudogenes, molecular fossils of working genes.

The human, worm…