8 March 2023
The Cambrian fossil Protomelission was identified in 2021 as a type of coral-like animal called a bryozoan, but new specimens make it look more like a kind of green algae
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?
20 July 2022
A fossil from 385 million years ago named Qikiqtania wakei shows that a descendant of early land animals lost its adaptations for land and became a more efficient swimmer
7 July 2022
A dinosaur discovered in Argentina has been identified as a new species. Meraxes gigas lived 20 million years before T. rex, but had a similarly large body, sharp teeth and proportionately small arms
28 July 2021
The preserved remains of sponges found in Canada suggest that animals may have originated 350 million years earlier than we thought
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
30 April 2018
A plant fossil that lay unnoticed for a century is unexpectedly large for something so old, and it could upend our ideas about the evolution of land plants
23 April 2018
Earth’s air suddenly got a lot more oxygen around 1.6 billion years ago and that could have triggered the evolution of large multicellular organisms
23 April 2018
A pair of mass extinctions struck in quick succession just before the dinosaur era, and the birth of a mountain range in South Africa may have been partly to blame
