Courtesy of Zhu Youan. Chinese scientists have discovered fossils of bony fish dating back about 436 million years, providing key evidence that hel ...

A newly discovered collection of 400-million-year-old bony fish fossils is rewriting the history of vertebrate evolution.

“O’clock” is a shortened form of the phrases “of the clock” and “of clock,” which people began using to communicate the time ...

The fossilised bones of our ancestors remain silent. So, how can we possibly imagine what our earliest languages sounded like?

Our single-celled ancestor lived in a world without plants, animals or oxygen-rich oceans. Yet, this seemingly simple microorganism took the first steps toward complex life. From this ancestor emerged ...

In a paper in Palaeobiodiversity and Palaeoenvironments, researchers argue that a 7.2-million-year-old femur from the Azmaka site preserves a blend of traits consistent with an early, transitional ...

Scientists are trying to understand how complex life emerged on Earth about 2 billion years ago. Our microbial ancestors could be the key.

While there is a common belief that the evolution of humans can be traced back to fishlike vertebrate ancestors, pinpointing the origins of bony fish — a key group in this evolution — remains ...

A few teeth, smaller than a grain of rice, are changing the map of your earliest primate relatives. They come from a creature called Purgatorius, a tiny tree-dwelling mammal that lived about 66 ...

In the early 2000s, a relatively new concept emerged to describe a very specific type of desire. The word sapiosexual describes a person who is sexually attracted to intelligence. For these ...

Scientists are one step closer to understanding the origins of complex life on Earth after shedding new light on a mystery about our microbial ancestors. The key may lie in ...

A resurrected ancient enzyme is helping scientists test how reliably Earth’s oldest rocks record signs of life.