Cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, on the surface of a lake. Bacteria were the first organisms to photosynthesize, creating the oxygen essential for the evolution of life on Earth. Philipp Schulze / ...

This has been quite the wild year in human evolution stories. Our relatives, living and extinct, got a lot of attention—from ...

Climate change and asteroids are linked with animal origin and extinction -- and plate tectonics also seems to play a key evolutionary role, 'groundbreaking' new fossil research reveals. The discovery ...

Sponges are among Earth's most ancient animals, but exactly when they evolved has long puzzled scientists. Genetic ...

Jawbones and other remains, similar to specimens found in Europe, were dated to 773,000 years and help close a gap in ...

Charles Darwin worried that the fossil record looked strangely abrupt, with complex animals appearing in a geological instant ...

A new study shows how the mismatch between where fossils are preserved and where humans likely lived may influence our understanding of early human evolution. Much of the early human fossil record ...

Rachael has a degree in Zoology from the University of Southampton, and specializes in animal behavior, evolution, palaeontology, and the environment. Rachael has a degree in Zoology from the ...

Beginning with a recently discovered 47-million-year-old primate fossil, Switek effectively and eloquently demonstrates the exponential increase in fossils that have been found since Darwin first ...

Coelacanths, often termed “living fossils”, represent an extraordinary lineage of lobe‐finned fishes with a fossil record spanning from the Devonian to the present. Their evolutionary history is ...

A new study led by researchers at the American Museum of Natural History presents the oldest known example in the fossil record of an evolutionary arms race. These 517-million-year-old predator-prey ...