A remarkable fossil discovery in southwest China is rewriting the story of how complex animal life began, showing that many key animal groups appeared millions of years earlier than scientists once ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Ancient animal history is extremely difficult to reconstruct, for a number of reasons. Some of the earliest creatures in existence ...

A completely new order of marine sponges has been found by researchers at the Museum of Evolution, Uppsala University. The sponge order, named Vilesida, produces substances that could be used in drug ...

Life began in the sea, and it took a long time to move onto land. Plants started creeping ashore about 475 million years ago. Roughly 100 million years later, the first backboned animals followed. For ...

If you trace the animal family tree back through the fossil record, the trail usually goes cold about 539 million years ago. Before this boundary—the start of the famous Cambrian explosion—multicelled ...