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 August 2019
Everything you need to know about the world’s greatest science festival which returns to ExCeL in London from 10 to 13 October 2019. Buy tickets on the door and meet astronaut Tim Peake and see hundreds of amazing talks.
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
13 March 2018
The bird-like dinosaur Archaeopteryx could flap its wings to fly, but only for short bursts – like a modern pheasant flapping to escape danger
26 January 2018
Tens of millions of years before dinosaurs evolved into birds, a proto-dinosaur had surprising features that suggest its young needed parental care after hatching
22 December 2017
The strange Ediacarans were some of the earliest complex organisms on Earth. They are thought to have died out 540 million years ago but eight odd fossils suggest they survived far longer
13 December 2017
A nearly complete skeleton of an early long-necked plesiosaur has been found in a clay pit in Germany, and reveals they survived a mass extinction
