New evidence published today in the journal Science upends decades of evolutionary theory about when animals first walked on ...

Life began in the sea, and it took a long time to move onto land. Plants started creeping ashore about 475 million years ago. Roughly 100 million years later, the first backboned animals followed. For ...

A remarkable fossil discovery in southwest China is rewriting the story of how complex animal life began, showing that many key animal groups appeared millions of years earlier than scientists once ...

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 ...

WASHINGTON — 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 that ...

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.

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 ...

For the first time, scientists have analyzed metabolism-related molecules from the fossilized bones of animals that lived 1.3 to 3 million years ago, revealing insights about both the animals and ...