Nearly 30 years ago, a research vessel off the southeast coast of Australia dragged up samples of the sea floor from depths of 400m and 1000m. Hidden away within the samples were a few unexpected gems ...

Over the past few years, studies of genomes have confused what we thought we knew about the origin of animal life. Instead of the simple sponges being the earliest branch off the animal tree, a group ...

Utah biologists have characterized D. woaabi, the first of two nematode species recently discovered in the lake’s ...

You’ve heard of a sea cucumber, but how about a sea mushroom? This week, scientists described a mushroom-shaped sea creature that may be in a phylum all its own. Two species of the newly described ...

The group with the world's simplest animals -- tiny blob-like life forms with no organs and just a few cell types -- finally has a fleshed-out family tree. The study comes more than 100 years after ...

Genetic analysis of an obscure, worm-like creature retrieved from the depths of the North Atlantic has led to the discovery of a new phylum, a rare event in an era when most organisms have already ...

DNA sequence data from neglected animal groups support a controversial hypothesis of deep evolutionary history. Inferring that history using only whole-genome sequences can evidently be misleading.

Parasitism evolved at least 223 times, far more than the previous estimate of 60. It arose more times in certain phyla (e.g., arthropods, nematodes, flatworms, and mollusks) than in others. Today, ...

All animals–from corgis to Greenland sharks, from dog ticks to toucans to you–descend from a common ancestor. The fossil record of animals, which runs back over 600 million years, can help us travel ...

Jordi Paps receives funding from the University of Essex, the Royal Society, and the Wellcome Trust. Whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a ...