For more than a century, the Cambrian explosion has served as biology’s big bang: the moment, roughly 538.8 million years ago, when complex animal body plans seemingly burst into 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 ...

Bryozoans are tiny, filter-feeding colonial invertebrates that thrive in the world's oceans today, yet for decades their origins presented a puzzling gap in the fossil record. While nearly every other ...