The astonishing similarity in the appearance of embryos from different animal species was observed as far back as the 19th century by scientists such as Karl von Baer, Charles Darwin and Ernst Haeckel. Such observations prompted the hypothesis that the individual development of an organism reflects its evolutionary history or phylogeny. Two groups of scientists, including researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Genetics in Dresden and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön, have now succeeded in demonstrating, for the first time, that parallels exist between individual development and phylogeny on the level of gene expression.