A rare 3D snake fossil from Brazil reveals specialized features for burrowing, offering new evidence of how diverse snakes ...

By Will Dunham July 23 (Reuters) - Snakes first appeared during the age of dinosaurs, but fossils of many early species are so fragmentary that scientists have had difficulty deciphering their ...

From butterflies to blue whales, corals and worms, Earth is home to an incredible diversity of animals. How all of these animals evolved from earlier, simpler ancestors is one of the most exciting ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Today a stretch of Canada’s remote Northwest Territories is covered in snow-covered peaks. But more than half a billion years ago ...

For more than a century, fossils meant bones, shells and the occasional imprint of a leaf. Now, a wave of research is showing that the most revealing relics of ancient organisms are not their shapes ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Fossils from ancient Australian seas suggest early eukaryotes depended on oxygen and lived mainly on the seafloor. (CREDIT: ...

More than 3.5 billion years ago, the Earth was not the hospitable world we know today. The atmosphere lacked oxygen, the seas were acidic and rich in iron, and volcanic activity roared across a barren ...

WASHINGTON — Newly discovered fossils have given scientists their first real glimpse of when Earth made a crucial transition from plants and unrecognizably simple animals to the complex creatures that ...

The questions of how humankind came to be, and whether we are alone in the universe, have captured imaginations for millennia. But to answer these questions, scientists must first understand life ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Fossils of two amphibians that lived within the Antarctic circle 360 million years ago are forcing scientists to rethink the origins of land vertebrates, including where these ...

Early eukaryotes, the lineage that later gave rise to animals, plants and fungi, may have depended on oxygen from the start. However, they mostly stayed on the seafloor. That narrow habitat could help ...