What does it take for soft-bodied animals, built to rot not to rock, to persist for 500 million years in the Grand Canyon?

A newfound fossil site in China is teeming with bizarre, primitive species that have never before been found any place on Earth. The bounty of creatures includes a spiny, segmented animal known as a ...

This early animal behavior changes how we see success in evolution. It wasn’t just about being good on your own; it was about being smart together. These Cambrian groups were the first social networks ...

Beginning around 542 million years ago, a profusion of animals with shells and skeletons began to appear in the fossil record. So many life forms appeared during this time that it is often referred to ...

When did animals originate? Evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin may have speculated about the forms that early animals took, but our research published in the journal Palaeontology answers the animal ...

All the major groups of animals appear in the fossil record for the first time around 540-500 million years ago -- an event known as the Cambrian Explosion -- but new research suggests that for most ...

Charles Darwin worried that the fossil record looked strangely abrupt, with complex animals appearing in a geological instant ...

Aug. 21 (UPI) --New fossil analysis suggests the planet's earliest known animals emerged at least 571 million years ago. The new study -- published this month in the journal Paleontology-- proves ...

Biomechanical studies on the arachnid-like front "legs" of an extinct apex predator show that the 2-foot (60 centimeter) marine animal Anomalocaris canadensis was likely much weaker than once assumed.

For hundreds of millions of years, the earliest life on Earth mostly took the form of relatively simple organisms. But analysis of the Earth's fossil record shows that there was a remarkable increase ...

If you were to condense the planet’s 4.5-billion-year history into a single calendar year, then sometime from the 18th to the 20th of November, as conventional wisdom would have it, the animal kingdom ...