The Cambrian Explosion is a landmark moment in the history of life on Earth when many of the major groups of animals first appear in the fossil record. New research, however, suggests that many of ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. New research finds chemical fossils from sponges in rocks over 541 million years old, suggesting animals emerged earlier than once ...

Half a billion years ago, the first true eye emerged in Earth’s oceans. Fossils now reveal what that ancient crystal vision ...

This early animal behavior changes how we see success in evolution. It wasn’t just about being good on your own; it was about being smart together. These Cambrian groups were the first social networks ...

Over half a billion years ago, during the Cambrian geological period, life on Earth started to get a lot more interesting. Thanks to the rise in free oxygen generated mostly by photosynthesizing algae ...

If you were to condense the planet’s 4.5-billion-year history into a single calendar year, then sometime from the 18th to the 20th of November, as conventional wisdom would have it, the animal kingdom ...

The Cambrian is rightly famous for being the period when animal life first exploded into a dizzying diversity of forms, including some body plans that remain with us today. But the first animals in ...

Beginning around 542 million years ago, a profusion of animals with shells and skeletons began to appear in the fossil record. So many life forms appeared during this time that it is often referred to ...

DURING the Cambrian period, which began 541m years ago, animal life took a remarkable leap forward. The first creatures believed by most (though not all) palaeontologists to be multicellular animals ...

A team of scientists digging up some of the Earth’s oldest rocks has uncovered new chemical evidence that Earth’s first animals were likely ancestors of the modern sea sponge. The discovery relies on ...

Timeline: The Cambrian Explosion and Animal Diversity Let’s go back 541 million years. Earth was about to throw the most spectacular evolutionary party in history. For billions of years, life had been ...