Nearly 30 years ago, a research vessel off the southeast coast of Australia dragged up samples of the sea floor from depths of 400m and 1000m. Hidden away within the samples were a few unexpected gems ...

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 ...

A recent paper in Nature details what scientists found at the Huayuan biota: Here we report the Huayuan biota — a lower ...

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 ...

Parasitism evolved at least 223 times, far more than the previous estimate of 60. It arose more times in certain phyla (e.g., arthropods, nematodes, flatworms, and mollusks) than in others. Today, ...

At present there are many animal phyla that contain only a few species. The existence of these small phyla can be used to test assumptions about speciation and extinction in multicellular animals. We ...