A newly discovered trove of fossils in southwestern China is shifting the timeline of when complex animals evolved. The diversity and complexity of animal life is thought to have increased rapidly ...

How ancient bryozoans may have looked. (Zhifei Zhang) The Cambrian explosion was one of the most dramatic chapters in the history of evolution. Around 540 million years ago, a sudden, astonishing ...

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 ...

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 ...

Bryozoans are tiny, filter-feeding colonial invertebrates that thrive in the world's oceans today, yet for decades their origins presented a puzzling gap in the fossil record. While nearly every other ...

Scientists have uncovered the earliest fossil evidence of annelids (ringed worms) in Cambrian microfossils dating back approximately 535 million years ago. This discovery offers fresh insights into ...

For decades, one puzzle stood out among the many mysteries of early animal evolution: the missing origin story of bryozoans. These tiny, filter-feeding colonial animals live in almost every ocean ...

Fossils of Spriggina floundersi provide the earliest evidence of animals favouring one side of the body over the other – a ...