Six million years later, shortly before the Cambrian Explosion, the sensory landscape was transformed. While animals with limited senses still existed, others were making more direct paths towards ...

For decades, scientists have sought to explain the so-called "Cambrian Explosion," a pivotal period over 500 million years ago when a remarkable diversity of animal life appeared in the fossil record.

A newly discovered trove of fossils in southwestern China is shifting the timeline of when complex animals evolved. The diversity and complexity of animal life is thought to have increased rapidly ...

Animal life is extraordinarily diverse and complex, having colonised almost all environments on Earth – from hostile hydrothermal vents in the deep sea to the skies across our continents. But all this ...

An international study led by Flinders University has found a fertile area of inspiration to explain an important step in evolution – and it’s a whole lot of poop. The new study describes the ‘faecal ...

Bryozoans are marine invertebrates that live in colonies and have long been considered absent from the Cambrian explosion — a rapid evolutionary event that began around 538 million years ago. Newly ...

Some 540 million years ago, life on Earth suddenly got interesting. For 20 million years or so, evolution went into overdrive. Called the Cambrian explosion, scientists have no idea why it happened.