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 ...

Fossils from 520-million-year-old rocks in China provide the first clear evidence that bryozoans were part of the Cambrian explosion. Bryozoans are tiny, filter-feeding colonial animals common in ...

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 ...

Animal life is extraordinarily diverse and complex, having colonized almost all environments on Earth—from hostile hydrothermal vents in the deep sea to the skies across our continents. But the planet ...

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 ...

This November 2023 photo provided by Gaorong Li shows a Haootia-like fossil at Yunnan University in Kunming, China. (Gaorong Li via AP) (Gaorong Li, Gaorong Li) WASHINGTON – Newly discovered fossils ...

Entire groups of organisms – and possibly even ecosystems – may still await discovery within museum drawers or poorly studied ...

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 ...