The next time you go wild swimming, whether in a lake, river or sea, you are probably sharing the water with one of your tiniest, yet closest relatives. Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest ...

Hundreds of millions of years ago, the first animals to crawl onto land were strict meat-eaters, even as plants had already taken over the landscape. Now scientists have uncovered a ...

Sponges may be ancient, but their timeline has been murky. New research suggests the earliest sponges were soft and skeleton-free, explaining why their fossils don’t appear until much later. By ...

Today, Earth is home to animals of all shapes and sizes, from nearly microscopic creatures like tardigrades to 80-foot-long (25 meters) blue whales. These organisms have arisen and evolved over ...

Which animals came first? For more than a century, most evidence suggested that sponges, immobile filter-feeders that lack muscles, neurons and other specialized tissues, were the first animal ...

The next time you go wild swimming, whether in a lake, river or sea, you are probably sharing the water with one of your tiniest, yet closest relatives. Choanoflagellates, like most single celled ...