The next time you go wild swimming, whether in a lake, river or sea, you are probably sharing the water with one of your tiniest, yet closest relatives. Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest ...

Sponges may be ancient, but their timeline has been murky. New research suggests the earliest sponges were soft and skeleton-free, explaining why their fossils don’t appear until much later. By ...

For almost two decades, scientists have debated whether sponges or comb jellies are the first animal lineage. Now some are calling for a more harmonious approach. Which animals came first? For more ...

Life on Earth started in the oceans. Sometime around 475 million years ago, plants began making their way from the water onto the land, and it took another 100 million years for the first animals with ...

Scientists at MIT have found compelling chemical evidence that Earth’s earliest animals were likely ancient sea sponges. Hidden inside rocks over 541 million years old are rare molecular “fingerprints ...

Which animals came first? For more than a century, most evidence suggested that sponges, immobile filter-feeders that lack muscles, neurons and other specialized tissues, were the first animal ...