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 ...

A rare fossil discovery is shedding light on the “missing years” of early sponge evolution. Scientists found a ...

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 ...

If you trace the animal family tree back through the fossil record, the trail usually goes cold about 539 million years ago.

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 that ...

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 ...

Scientists discovered a giant echidna fossil in Australia that shows these animals lived across a wider area during the Ice ...

KUNMING -- Chinese scientists have discovered well-preserved multicellular animal fossils in Ediacaran strata of eastern Yunnan, indicating that complex animal communities existed in oceans long ...

A sweeping genetic study of over 150 species reveals that life’s move from water to land was not a single story, but a series ...

Tiny structures found in ancient Canadian rocks could be the oldest traces of animal life ever identified, dating back nearly ...