Around 540 million years ago, the ocean erupted with complex life: Creatures rapidly transformed from simple, soft-bodied, ...

If you trace the animal family tree back through the fossil record, the trail usually goes cold about 539 million years ago.

A remarkable assemblage of fossils from China is revealing that animal life diversified in Earth’s primordial seas millions of years earlier than previously known, with an array of forms including ...

Hundreds of Chinese fossils from the dawn of animal evolution may change how scientists think of this critical period of ...

Scientists discovered a giant echidna fossil in Australia that shows these animals lived across a wider area during the Ice ...

In the aftermath of Earth’s most catastrophic extinction event, one unlikely survivor rose to dominate a shattered world: ...

More than two decades after scientists identified a fossil as the world’s oldest octopus — officials now say it wasn’t one at ...

Fossils in China show that complex animals existed before the Cambrian explosion, changing our understanding of how life ...

Newfound fossils from China suggest that complex animals were around millions of years earlier than thought, among them ...

Between 280 and 200 million years ago, a group of animals evolved which would eventually give rise to mammals, including ...

A fossil once believed to show the world’s oldest imprint of an octopus – some 300 million years old – is actually another ...

Some of the most ancient fossils collected to date were traced back to the Ediacaran period. This is the time interval ranging from around 635 to 541 million years ago, shortly before the time when ...