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 ...

A rare chemical indicator suggests sponges may have arrived as the first animals on Earth. A sterol core is primarily composed of four fused carbon rings, along with carbon side chains and other ...

Experts think they may have uncovered what the first ever animal on Earth looked like after ancient chemical signals were found. For as long as scientists have understood evolution, the debate over ...

What types of animals first existed on Earth long ago? This is what a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences hopes to address as a team of scientists ...

Life on Earth started in the oceans. Sometime around 475 million years ago, plants began making their way from the water onto the land, and it took another 100 million years for the first animals with ...

A team of MIT geochemists has unearthed new evidence in very old rocks suggesting that some of the first animals on Earth were likely ancestors of the modern sea sponge. In a study appearing today in ...