In the first 20 million years of the Cambrian period, Earth experienced an explosion of life—a great evolutionary era dubbed the Cambrian Explosion. Scientists have differing views on what drove this ...

As all children learn, everyone poos. But when did this begin? And what evolutionary and environmental changes accompanied ...

That’s the premise of a paper published earlier this month in Trends in Ecology & Evolution. The research began as an effort ...

Is it the theory of evo-poo-tion? While poop may seem like a revolting subject, it could could also be responsible for life ...

Fossilized feces may have helped fuel the Cambrian Explosion by moving nutrients and organic matter through ancient oceans as ...

A study of fossilized feces, known as coprolites, from 540 million years ago found fecal matter likely played a significant ...

Known as the Cambrian Explosion, this flurry of rapid evolution produced most of the animal phyla and ecosystems we see around us today. And it may have taken off because some of those early animals ...

Called the Cambrian explosion, scientists have no idea why it happened. “We see the first evidence of basically every major animal group all pop into existence,” says Karma Nanglu, a paleontologist ...

(Kimmig & Bicknell, Trends Ecol. Evol., 2026) We may owe our very existence to an ancient poop explosion. If the earliest ...

Animal life is extraordinarily diverse and complex, having colonised almost all environments on Earth – from hostile hydrothermal vents in the deep sea to the skies across our continents. But all this ...

Bryozoans are tiny, filter-feeding colonial invertebrates that thrive in the world's oceans today, yet for decades their origins presented a puzzling gap in the fossil record. While nearly every other ...