Biologists have long drawn the animal family tree with a hazy base, unsure which creature first split from the common ancestor that gave rise to everything from jellyfish to humans. Now, a new genomic ...

For almost two decades, scientists have debated whether sponges or comb jellies are the first animal lineage. Now some are ...

Birds are the most diverse land vertebrate on the planet, and now scientists have constructed a complete evolutionary tree of the 11,000 or so known species. This data came from hundreds of studies ...

To understand the origins of multicelled life, researchers are studying a motley assortment of simpler animal relatives. The commonalities they’re unearthing offer a trove of clues about our mutual ...

If you imagine the earliest animals on Earth, you might picture something simple but sturdy. Maybe a sponge-like creature ...

Recent research published in Nature has transformed our understanding of animal evolution by revealing that ctenophores, also known as comb jellies, represent the earliest branch of the animal tree of ...

"This book was originally published as an issue of Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society B; Biological sciences (volume 363; number 1496) but has been materially changed and updated"--Title ...

Coconut crabs are massive. Up to three feet in diameter, they scuttle across remote tropical islands in the western Indo-Pacific Ocean, cracking open coconuts like they’re made of butter, eating ...

Researchers from the Canadian Museum of Nature (CMN) have identified a new species of rhino that once roamed Canada's High Arctic 23 million years ago. The extinct rhinoceros, described in the journal ...