Sponges may be ancient, but their timeline has been murky. New research suggests the earliest sponges were soft and skeleton-free, explaining why their fossils don’t appear until much later. By ...

The Canadian fossils belong to the White Sea group. But they appear to be around 567 million years old – 5 to 10 million ...

Hundreds of millions of years ago, the first animals to crawl onto land were strict meat-eaters, even as plants had already taken over the landscape. Now scientists have uncovered a ...

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 ...

Long before dinosaurs roamed the land, Earth looked very different from the planet we know today. Around 500 million years ago, most of Earth's surface was bare rock and dry soil. There were no trees, ...