Surprisingly, genome comparisons have failed to resolve a major question in animal evolution: Which living animals are the descendants of the earliest animals to evolve in the world's oceans?

In the 19th century, Charles Darwin was one of the first to notice something interesting about domesticated animals: different species often developed similar changes when compared to their ancient ...

Movement ecologists study how animals move in ecosystems together with other individuals of the same or other species. When animals appear to move together, ecologists often assume they're interacting ...

A study published by MBARI researchers and their collaborators today in Nature provides new insights about one of the earliest points in animal evolution that happened more than 700 million years ago.

We pride ourselves on being the most intelligent of animals, the ones who dominate from the sky to the depths of the sea. This claim is not false, but it omits an essential aspect: the other creatures ...

Deep, deep in geologic time, some 600 million or 700 million years ago, the very first animals evolved on Earth. Their closest relatives that still live today include sponges, sea anemones and comb ...

For more than a century, biologists have wondered what the earliest animals were like when they first arose in the ancient oceans over half a billion years ago. Searching among today's most ...