In a hillside in Yunnan province, southwest China, paleontologists have pulled more than 700 fossils from rock that is roughly 554 million years old. The collection, known as the Jiangchuan Biota, ...

Sometime before 520 million years ago, animal life began to flourish as never before. The small shells, worms and even sponge-like enigmas of earlier eras suddenly unfolded into a new array of species ...

CHINA — 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.

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 ...

New research proposes the Brain-First Hypothesis: the evolution of the brain drove animal diversification during the Cambrian ...

IMAGE: Caption: Carbonate layers hold carbon isotope evidence of the late Precambrian greening of the Earth. These are located in the Old Dad Mountains in California. Credit: L.P. Knauth, Arizona ...

This animation created for Evolution: "Great Transformations" depicts creatures whose fossils were found at the Burgess Shale. As alien as these creatures seem, they are also surprisingly familiar.

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 ...