Newfound fossils from China suggest that complex animals were around millions of years earlier than thought, among them possibly our vertebrate ancestors.

The discovery of a new fossil site in China has revealed exceptionally well-preserved specimens from the Ediacaran Period.

The timeline of terrestrial evolution holds surprises. While scientists thought complex life required oxygen, a recent discovery shows it began forming in oceans deprived of this element, nearly a billion years earlier than estimated. The first organisms ...

Complex life began to develop earlier, and over a longer span of time, than previously believed, a new study has revealed. The research sheds new light on the conditions needed for early organisms to evolve and challenges several long-standing scientific ...

(CNN) — 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, they suspect, may lie in how simple microbes that lived billions of years ago ...

A biochemist, building on the pillars of evolutionary theory and drawing on cutting-edge research into the link between energy and genes, argues that the evolution of multicellular life was the result of a single event. "To explain the mystery of how life ...