Thousands of years ago in a cave on Hispaniola, an unusual chain of events left behind a rare scientific treasure: bees nesting inside fossilized bones. After giant barn owls repeatedly brought prey ...

An artistic rendering shows the mysterious animal, which researchers now say was a nautilus relative, in its prehistoric environment. University of Reading For more than a decade, an imposter may have ...

In 2000, researchers described an odd fossil found not far from Chicago. It had a round body, finlike structures on one end and a tangle of arms. The fossil was classified as an octopus and named ...

A famous 300-million-year-old fossil that was thought to be the world's oldest octopus—even featuring in the Guinness Book of Records—has turned out to be something else altogether. In what amounts to ...

Goblet-shaped sea jelly relatives with miniature “arms.” A plump, legless creature resembling a sausage. Long, wormlike animals tipped with flat “holdfast” discs for anchoring to the seafloor.

A groundbreaking discovery of fossils has provided scientists with an unprecedented insight into a pivotal moment in Earth's history: the transition from rudimentary plant and animal life to the ...

More than 539 million years ago, soft, clarinet-shaped animals anchored themselves to the seafloor on disc-shaped bases, swaying alongside stalked animals resembling worms and baskets. These ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Catarina Rolfsdotter-Jansson is a leader in sustainable development. This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more. This ...

The details of how animal life began are a bit murky. Most of the groups familiar today are present in the Cambrian, a period when they rapidly diversified, with familiar features evolving alongside ...

A huge and beautifully preserved suite of fossils discovered in China has cast doubt on the idea that complex life flourished dramatically during a rapid burst of evolution known as the Cambrian ...

A newly discovered fossil site in southwest China has transformed our understanding of how complex animal life emerged on Earth, revealing that many key animal groups had already evolved before the ...

Researchers argue that a newly examined specimen found decades ago in Utah provides new clues to the ancestors of chelicerates before the group hit it big on land. By Jack Tamisiea Everyone has come ...