Charles Darwin worried that the fossil record looked strangely abrupt, with complex animals appearing in a geological instant ...

Fossils unearthed in Ethiopia are reshaping our view of human evolution. Instead of a straight march from ape-like ancestors to modern humans, researchers now see a tangled, branching tree with ...

The textbook version of human evolution has long held that Homo erectus was the pioneering species to venture beyond Africa's borders around 1.8 million years ago. However, new analysis of five skulls ...

The birds of today descended from the dinosaurs of yore. Researchers have known relatively little, however, about how the bird's brain took shape over tens of millions of years. "Birds are one of the ...

In Earth's fossil record, soft-bodied organisms like jellyfish rarely stand the test of time. What's more, it's hard for any ...

The year's top paleontological wonders ranged from a 540-million-year-old penis worm to a decades-old rodent impression.

Scientists have uncovered a remarkable fossil from Canada's Burgess Shale, a discovery that reshapes how the evolution of arthropods is understood. This new find, named Mosura fentoni, lived ...

To clarify the early evolutionary history of Cicadoidea fossils, the phylogenetic relationships between Mesozoic fossils and extant Cicadoidea, the macroevolution of body structure adaptations, ...