Tracks left by some of the earliest complex animals are giving new insights into how they experienced the world. New research ...

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 ...

For more than a century, the Cambrian explosion has served as biology’s big bang: the moment, roughly 538.8 million years ago, when complex animal body plans seemingly burst into the fossil record ...

Bryozoans are tiny, filter-feeding colonial invertebrates that thrive in the world's oceans today, yet for decades their ...

How Did These Strange, Ancient Organisms Turn into Such Remarkable Fossils? New Research in Geology reveals why the 570-million-year-old Ediacaran Biota were so exceptionally preserved. Boulder, Colo.

A reconstruction of the Jiangchuan biota, an assemblage of early animals represented by fossils from a newly discovered fossil site in China?s Yunnan Province dating to about 554 to 539 million years ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: Most of these fossilized animals are ancestors of modern invertebrates, including modern starfish, but a few among them count as ancient ancestors of ...

Collection of fossils includes Ediacaran, Cambrian species, suggesting a transition. If, as the Jiangchuan Biota suggest, the Ediacaran gently eased into the Cambrian, then why has there appeared to ...

More than 539 million years ago, soft, clarinet-shaped animals anchored themselves to the seafloor on disc-shaped bases, swaying alongside stalked animals resembling worms and baskets. These ...