Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. A rare, half-billion-year-old fossil gives us a clue to how a ...

If you were to condense the planet’s 4.5-billion-year history into a single calendar year, then sometime from the 18th to the 20th of November, as conventional wisdom would have it, the animal kingdom ...

How animals of the Cambrian period experienced the Cambrian Explosion, which shaped life today and could help researchers understand life on other planets. Animals of the Cambrian period went through ...

This animation created for Evolution: "Great Transformations" depicts creatures whose fossils were found at the Burgess Shale. As alien as these creatures seem, they are also surprisingly familiar.

When animal life exploded in the oceans more than 500 million years ago, it changed the face of the planet. Now it seems the effects of that burst of evolution reached thousands of kilometres into ...

Before the Cambrian explosion created the vast majority of Earth’s first animals 540 million years ago, the world was a relatively quiet place. But that doesn’t mean it was lifeless. Before the ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. A newfound fossil site in China is teeming with bizarre, primitive species that have never before ...

Ever since their discovery in 1909, the spectacular Burgess Shale outcrops in the Canadian Rockies have presented scientists with a cornucopia of evidence for the “explosion” of complex, multicellular ...

The Cambrian Period is the first geological time period of the Paleozoic Era (the "time of ancient life"). This period lasted from 541 million to 485.4 million years ago, or more than 55 million years ...