New fossil evidence from China suggests that some of our vertebrate ancestors had four eyes. The study, published in Nature, takes a closer look at a structure found in multiple 518 million-year-old ...

A groundbreaking study suggests that the famous Cambrian explosion—the dramatic burst of diverse animal life—might have actually started millions of years earlier than we thought. By analyzing ancient ...

The details of how animal life began are a bit murky. Most of the groups familiar today are present in the Cambrian, a period when they rapidly diversified, with familiar features evolving alongside ...

Tiny balls of mineral are opening a new window into the history of life on Earth. These millimeter-sized objects are more than half a billion years old – the fossilized embryos of animals that lived ...

For more than a century, the Cambrian explosion has served as biology’s big bang: the moment, roughly 538.8 million years ago ...

A huge and beautifully preserved suite of fossils discovered in China has cast doubt on the idea that complex life flourished dramatically during a rapid burst of evolution known as the Cambrian ...

Remarkably preserved relics from southern China — more than half representing species new to science — are transforming our understanding of organisms that survived the first mass extinction of the ...

Paleontologists have discovered remarkable fossils in the Grand Canyon that reveal fresh details about the emergence of complex life half a billion years ago. The newfound remains of fauna from the ...

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 ...