This Michigan shoreline looks peaceful today, but the rocks underfoot tell a much older story. Standing on 390-million-year-old Devonian limestone, they begin finding marine fossils from a time when ...

For the first 280 million years of animal life on Earth, slow-living creatures such as clam-like brachiopods and crinoid sea ...

There are exactly two kinds of free things in this world: the kind that make you suspicious, and the kind that make you ...

Clams and snails rule today’s shores because their ancient ancestors survived a catastrophe that erased nearly all ocean life. The shells scattered along modern beaches are clues to an ancient ...

Long before dinosaurs ruled the continents and modern crocodiles first appeared, their ancestors were already going through a decisive phase in their evolutionary history. It was in this ancient world ...

Long before the first dinosaur took a step, strange sea creatures shaped like stalked flowers were already thriving in some of Earth’s earliest coral reefs. This was before plants or animals had even ...

Standing on the summit of Mount Everest feels like reaching the highest possible point on Earth. The mountain rises nearly nine kilometres above sea level, surrounded by ice, rock and thin air.

A rare 450-million-year-old fossil with preserved soft tissue is revealing how some of Earth’s earliest reef animals lived and evolved. More than 450 million years ago, long before dinosaurs appeared ...

Last September, a train pulled out of Surakarta in central Java, Indonesia. On board was Eduard Pop, a palaeoanthropologist at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands, and a ...

Long before the first dinosaurs walked the Earth, and even before animals or plants colonized the land surface, distant relatives of starfish known as crinoids, which resemble sea flowers attached by ...

Crinoid fossils turn up by the millions, but this is just the second time that scientists have found one with soft tissues still intact.

NORMAN, OKLA. – Before the oldest dinosaur, before animals or even plants had expanded onto dry land, ancient relatives of starfish called crinoids, resembling stalked sea flowers, were among the ...