When paleontologists picture the earliest animals, they tend to imagine something with at least a rudimentary skeleton: a ...

A rare fossil discovery is shedding light on the “missing years” of early sponge evolution. Scientists found a 550-million-year-old sponge that likely lacked hard skeletal parts, explaining why ...

Geobiologists reported a 550 million-year-old sea sponge that had been missing from the fossil record. The discovery sheds new light on a conundrum that has stumped zoologists and paleontologists for ...

Molecular clocks, which use the mutation rate of biomolecules to deduce how long ago two species diverged, and phylogenetics (the evolutionary relationships between species) can tell us when sea ...

For decades, scientists have debated which animals first appeared on Earth and set the stage for the evolution of complex life. A recent study by MIT geochemists offers compelling evidence that the ...

Virginia Tech geobiologist Shuhai Xiao and collaborators reported a 550 million-year-old sea sponge fossil, filling in a gap in the evolutionary family tree of one of the earliest animals. Photo by ...

Prof. YUAN Xunlai from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and his team have discovered a late Ediacaran crown-group sponge, Helicolocellus, from the ...