High on the Franklin Mountains, the Thunderbird formation combines billions of years of geological history with rich ...

The Ediacaran, an era that ended about 540 million years ago, is considered the prelude to the Cambrian explosion, a period ...

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

Fossils fascinated Sir David Attenborough throughout his childhood. The BBC retraces the steps of Sir David's formative experiences roaming the British countryside.

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 ...

This report reviews and incorporates new elemental and isotope chemostratigraphic data for correlation of Neoproterozoic carbonate-dominated successions in South America (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, ...

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 ...

Move over, megalodon, there’s a new contender for most terrifying marine predator of all time. An analysis of fossil jaws belonging to octopuses that lived between 100 million and 72 million years ago ...

WASHINGTON (AP) — 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 ...

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.