Earth’s first sponges may have been ghostly, soft-bodied pioneers—ancient animals that evolved long before their skeletons ...

For decades, scientists have puzzled over a significant gap in the fossil record of Earth's earliest animals, with genetic ...

Hallucigenia was such an odd animal that palaeontologists reconstructed it upside-down when they first analysed its fossils - ...

The oldest fossilized remains of complex animals appear suddenly in the fossil record, and as if from nowhere, in rocks that are 538 million years old. The rapid arrival of animals so different to ...