Learn how a second pair of eyes helped this 518-million-year-old fish evade predators.

A team of scientists digging up some of the Earth’s oldest rocks has uncovered new chemical evidence that Earth’s first animals were likely ancestors of the modern sea sponge. The discovery relies on ...

A recent paper in Nature details what scientists found at the Huayuan biota: Here we report the Huayuan biota — a lower ...

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 ...

The Cambrian is rightly famous for being the period when animal life first exploded into a dizzying diversity of forms, including some body plans that remain with us today. But the first animals in ...

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 ...

A treasure trove of exceptionally preserved early animals from more than half a billion years ago has been discovered in the Grand Canyon, one of the natural world's most iconic sites. Subscribe to ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

DURING the Cambrian period, which began 541m years ago, animal life took a remarkable leap forward. The first creatures believed by most (though not all) palaeontologists to be multicellular animals ...