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 ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Around 540 million years ago, the ocean erupted with complex life: Creatures rapidly transformed from simple, soft-bodied, ...

How ancient bryozoans may have looked. (Zhifei Zhang) The Cambrian explosion was one of the most dramatic chapters in the history of evolution. Around 540 million years ago, a sudden, astonishing ...

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 ...

More than 500 million years ago, during what is known as the Cambrian period, the seas and oceans on Earth were filled with a myriad of marine animals, many of which have now become extinct. This ...

For decades, scientists have wondered what triggered the sudden "explosion" of complex animal life on Earth. This new hypothesis suggests that the answer isn't found in shells or legs, but in the ...

Bryozoans are tiny, filter-feeding colonial invertebrates that thrive in the world's oceans today, yet for decades their origins presented a puzzling gap in the fossil record. While nearly every other ...

A research team at Yunnan University has resolved a longstanding mystery regarding Earth’s earliest vertebrates, revealing ...

(CNN) — Goblet-shaped sea jelly relatives with miniature “arms.” A plump, legless creature resembling a sausage. Long, wormlike animals tipped with flat “holdfast” discs for anchoring to the seafloor.

WASHINGTON — 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 ...