29 December 2022
New fossil discoveries show predatory marine reptiles from 200 million years ago may have been bigger than today’s blue whales – and that they evolved astonishingly rapidly
8 November 2022
Flowerless gymnosperms, such as conifer and ginkgo, ruled the Jurassic world before their flowering rivals, the angiosperms, became dominant. What caused the fall of one and the rise of the other?
31 March 2022
After the extinction of the dinosaurs, mammals took over and had room to evolve larger bodies, but their brains remained small to begin with
14 August 2021
A 500-million-year-old comb jelly is so well-preserved that it’s possible to see it had a nervous system more complex than that of modern comb jellies
28 April 2021
Multicellular organisms were developing bodies with different kinds of cell much earlier than thought – a key step towards animals with complex bodies and multiple organs
15 February 2020
Fossils of single cells found in China are 2 billion years old, making them the oldest eukaryotic cells in the fossil record and possibly our distant relatives
6 November 2019
The Cambrian explosion is feted as the moment where complex animals burst onto the scene, but the enigmatic Ediacaran creatures that came first are rewriting the history of life on Earth
29 May 2019
Winged Jurassic dinosaur Archaeopteryx was more than just an early ancestor of birds – fossils reveal it was an evolutionary wonder akin to Darwin's finches
11 April 2019
A fossil of a Jurassic fly suggests that pollinating insects may have been flying around on Earth long before the first flowers had begun to bloom
23 January 2019
Fossils in China suggest that that some of the first animals in existence may have been carnivorous comb jellies similar to some species that still exist today
