Latimeria or Coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae Smith), A living fossil, the oldest known living lineage of Sarcopterygii (lobe-finned fish and tetrapods).© Openfinal/Shutterstock.com Nature craves ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. Life on Earth began over four billion years ago, not long ...

Animals maintain complex cultures, communication systems, infrastructure, and intergenerational knowledge, writes .

Ancient animal history is extremely difficult to reconstruct, for a number of reasons. Some of the earliest creatures in existence were soft-bodied and microscopic, leaving behind very little evidence ...

A long-neglected fossil seems to show the evolutionary leap that let the ancestors of today’s many-legged arthropods crawl ...

Deep in a dried-up riverbed in Brazil, scientists uncovered a bizarre prehistoric mystery—twisted jawbones from a strange, ...

Armed with the ability to accept all cells as its own, comb jellies can merge with others to survive. Here’s how it works. On a quiet summer day at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, ...

Museum drawers have revealed the fossilised remains of extinct giant echidnas, some as large as dogs. These discoveries shed ...

Well-preserved fossils of the oldest known species allowed researchers to find new information about the ancient animal.

Why do some ancient animals become fossils while others disappear without a trace? A new study from the University of Lausanne, published in Nature Communications, reveals that part of the answer lies ...

In many ancient cultures, animals were viewed as messengers of the divine or direct manifestations of deities. Temples, being the most sacred centers of worship, naturally became spaces where animals ...