A newly discovered trove of fossils in southwestern China is shifting the timeline of when complex animals evolved. The diversity and complexity of animal life is thought to have increased rapidly ...

That’s the premise of a paper published earlier this month in Trends in Ecology & Evolution. The research began as an effort ...

Animal life is extraordinarily diverse and complex, having colonised almost all environments on Earth – from hostile hydrothermal vents in the deep sea to the skies across our continents. But all this ...

Is it the theory of evo-poo-tion? While poop may seem like a revolting subject, it could could also be responsible for life ...

Called the Cambrian explosion, scientists have no idea why it happened. “We see the first evidence of basically every major animal group all pop into existence,” says Karma Nanglu, a paleontologist ...

As all children learn, everyone poos. But when did this begin? And what evolutionary and environmental changes accompanied ...

Known as the Cambrian Explosion, this flurry of rapid evolution produced most of the animal phyla and ecosystems we see around us today. And it may have taken off because some of those early animals ...

For decades, scientists have wondered what triggered the sudden "explosion" of complex animal life on Earth. This new hypothesis suggests that the answer isn't found in shells or legs, but in the ...

Around 540 million years ago, the biological landscape of Earth went through a huge transformation called the Cambrian ...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Newly discovered fossils have given scientists their first real glimpse of when Earth made a crucial transition from plants and unrecognizably simple animals to the complex creatures ...

Bryozoans are tiny, filter-feeding colonial invertebrates that thrive in the world's oceans today, yet for decades their origins presented a puzzling gap in the fossil record. While nearly every other ...