Whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. So wrote ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. Here's why Dickinsonia challenges our previously held ...

The group with the world's simplest animals -- tiny blob-like life forms with no organs and just a few cell types -- finally has a fleshed-out family tree. The study comes more than 100 years after ...

Which group of animals evolved first? This problem has become a bone of contention among biologists. An international research team is now confident that the definitive answer is at hand: Sponges ...

The initial phases of animal evolution proceeded faster than hitherto supposed: New analyses suggest that the first animal phyla emerged in rapid succession -- prior to the global Ice Age that set in ...

Students set sticky traps to collect organisms, identify and classify the organisms they find, and determine when the organisms first evolved. Every school and home contains organisms. Many are too ...

Which phylum first branched off from the animal phylogenetic tree is a contested issue. A new analysis challenges the proposal that comb jellies are the sister group to all other animals, and ...

Around half a billion years ago, life on Earth went through a rapid transformation, diversifying into almost all of the major animal groups we see today. How and why the Cambrian explosion occurred ...

The world’s simplest known animal is so poorly understood that it doesn’t even have a common name. Formally called Trichoplax adhaerens for the way it adheres to glassware, the amorphous blob isn’t ...

The group with the world’s simplest animals—tiny blob-like life forms with no organs and just a few cell types—finally has a fleshed-out family tree built by a research group led by the American ...