After studying rocks more than 541 million years old, MIT scientists have found new evidence that some of Earth’s first ...

A team of scientists digging up some of the Earth’s oldest rocks has uncovered new chemical evidence that Earth’s first animals were likely ancestors of the modern sea sponge. The discovery relies on ...

Virginia Tech geobiologist Shuhai Xiao and collaborators reported a 550 million-year-old sea sponge fossil, filling in a gap in the evolutionary family tree of one of the earliest animals. Photo by ...

Molecular clocks, which use the mutation rate of biomolecules to deduce how long ago two species diverged, and phylogenetics (the evolutionary relationships between species) can tell us when sea ...

A team from The Nippon Foundation’s Nekton Ocean Census worked with Schmidt Ocean Institute’s ship Falkor to reach far beneath Antarctic waters, where they found/discovered and recovered, with the ...

Biological systems are renowned for their ability to create strong yet resilient structures. A sea sponge, for instance, grows in layers, forming unique patterns that integrate minerals with softer ...

Scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara have discovered significant clues to the evolutionary origins of the nervous system by studying the genome of a sea sponge, a member of a ...

Photograper Julio A. Díaz. The new discoveries will increase the ecological importance of the Mallorca channel seamounts and the littoral caves, providing compelling arguments for the Spanish ...