The fossilized organisms of the Cambrian period some 500 million years ago are both alien and familiar. A few of them look a lot like the creatures around us today. But even some that don’t look at ...

A remarkable fossil hidden in a museum collection for decades is helping scientists rethink one of the biggest mysteries in ...

Stand atop the steep white cliffs that surround the giant rivers of Siberia, and your feet will mark a pivotal point in the history of life on Earth: the 541-million-year-old geologic boundary between ...

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Over 500 million years ago, sea-dwelling invertebrates pioneered a new evolutionary experiment: skeletons. But while those durable, tube-like structures stood the test of time as fossils, the animals' ...

If I were to ask you what was unusual about Mosura fentoni, you probably wouldn’t know where to start. It looks a bit like a moth, except it lived in the sea. It had three eyes, some weird appendages ...

Early animals formed complex ecological communities more than 550 million years ago, setting the evolutionary stage for the Cambrian explosion, according to a new study. Early animals formed complex ...

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 ...

The oceans teemed with life 600 million years ago, but the simple, soft-bodied creatures would have been hardly recognizable as the ancestors of nearly all animals on Earth today. Then something ...

Considering the fossils of the Cambrian, the oldest fossil-bearing rocks known during his time, Charles Darwin wrote the following in the 6th edition of On the Origin of Species; … it cannot be ...