First Animals May Have Appeared 200 Million Years Earlier than Their Oldest Fossils Suggest
The oldest undisputed animal fossils, from the Ediacaran biota, are about 574 million years old, but chemical traces…
Chemosymbiosis between Animals and Microbes May Predate the Cambrian: Study
A tubular marine creature that lived on the seafloor more than 540 million years ago may have survived…
Scientists find evidence for an ancient supercontinent that covered 80 percent of Earth’s surface
A new global isotopic map has revealed vast fragments of ancient Gondwanan crust buried beneath younger mountain belts…
Earth’s Earliest Animals May Have Thrived Too Easily to Evolve
Fossils from some of the oldest-known animals on Earth, dating from 574 million years ago (Ediacaran period), suggest…
Complex Colonial Life Was Already Thriving during Cambrian Explosion
Tiny colonial animals called bryozoans were long thought to have appeared tens of millions of years after the…
A Giant Magnetic Anomaly Over 500 Million Years Ago Can Finally Be Explained
Magnetic signatures hidden inside rocks tell us a lot about Earth’s magnetic field and the way continents and…
Ancestors of Modern Demosponges Were Earth’s First Animals: Study
Scientists from MIT and elsewhere have identified chemical fossils that may have been left by ancient sponges in…
The first animals on Earth may have been sea sponges, study suggests | MIT News
A team of MIT geochemists has unearthed new evidence in very old rocks suggesting that some of the…