A spectacular fossil trove on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen shows that marine life made a stunning comeback after Earth’s ...

For more than a century, fossils meant bones, shells and the occasional imprint of a leaf. Now, a wave of research is showing ...

Researchers used a miniaturized laser mass spectrometer to identify signs of fossils in a gypsum quarry in Algeria. They suggest the same tool could find early ...

Shifts in the Earth's continental plates that drove long-term changes in sea level set the stage for the evolution of the earliest animals on Earth, a study suggests. A newly developed timeline of ...

Over 500 million years ago, during the Cambrian period, all major animal phyla appeared rapidly in what is known as the Cambrian explosion, which established a completely new Earth-life system. This ...

Imagine Earth at a time when it was almost unrecognizable—a landscape that was barren and with barely breathable air. That is what Earth looked like about 1.75 billion years ago. But scientists now ...

Ordination methods and the evaluation of Ediacaran communities / Matthew E. Clapham -- Exploratory multivariate techniques and their utility for understanding ancient ecosystems / John W. Huntley -- ...

The questions of how humankind came to be, and whether we are alone in the universe, have captured imaginations for millennia. But to answer these questions, scientists must first understand life ...

Researchers found fragments of fossils representing prehistoric mollusks, crustaceans and worms among rocks at the Grand Canyon. Mussini et al. More than half a billion years ago, strange worms and ...

Geological and Evolutionary Setting of the Biota1 Geological time and the evolution of early life on Earth 2 The evolutionary significance of the Chengjiang biota 3 The discovery and initial study of ...