The newly discovered fossil records suggest that mold-like single-cell organisms "set the stage" for the animal kingdom to evolve, the researchers wrote in a new report, published in the journal ...

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 region of ...

Being a scientist is much like being a lawyer. You painstakingly gather evidence to support an argument — though one rooted in the scientific method, not courtroom conjecture. According to new ...

Our new study reveals a different, often overlooked factor. Daily swings in oxygen levels on the shallow seafloor may have stressed early animals (the ancestors of all animal life today), pushing them ...

The transition from water to land is a question that still intrigues scientists. Those ancient organisms would have needed to adapt to several new challenges to life out of water. So, how did they do ...

Researchers funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) at the University of Oxford have uncovered a clue that may help to explain why the earliest evidence of complex ...

For more than 100 years, biologists have wondered why animals display different types of life cycles. Some species, like humans and most vertebrates, develop directly into a fully formed yet smaller ...