An "extraordinary" species of fossil sponge dating back 315 million years has been discovered near the Cliffs of Moher in County Clare. The fossil sponge, named Cyathophycus balori, measures 50cm and ...

When paleontologists picture the earliest animals, they tend to imagine something with at least a rudimentary skeleton: a ...

Prof. YUAN Xunlai from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and his team have discovered a late Ediacaran crown-group sponge, Helicolocellus, from the ...

Afossil uncovered along the Yangtze River in China is forcing scientists to rethink not just the origins of sponges but also the way they search for the earliest traces of animal life. For decades, a ...

Molecular clocks, which use the mutation rate of biomolecules to deduce how long ago two species diverged, and phylogenetics (the evolutionary relationships between species) can tell us when sea ...

A 550-million-year-old sea sponge fossil discovered in China is helping scientists resolve a 160-million-year gap in the early history of animal life. The finding offers exceptional physical proof ...

More than 100 years ago, Charles Doolittle Walcott from the Smithsonian Institution was asked to examine strange star-shaped fossils with lobes hailing from the ~ 514-million-year-old Conasauga ...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A Canadian geologist may have found the earliest fossil record of animal life on Earth, according to a report published Wednesday in the journal Nature. Around a billion years ago, a ...

James Briggs leads a lesson on how the Earth was formed Monday, Feb.19, 2024, at the DaVinci Science Center during Earth Detectives one day camp. Campers examines fossils with a magnifying glass ...