Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. Life on Earth began over four billion years ago, not long ...

Latimeria or Coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae Smith), A living fossil, the oldest known living lineage of Sarcopterygii (lobe-finned fish and tetrapods).© Openfinal/Shutterstock.com Nature craves ...

New research shows ancient plague may have spread through livestock, not fleas, based on DNA from a 4,000-year-old sheep.

In the very heart of the ancient lands of Eurasia, a major scientific discovery has shed new light on one of the oldest and ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Archaeological sheep bones unveiled at a Bronze Age site in the Eurasian steppe. Ancient animal bones are the key to understanding ...

Judging by its giant, claw-like feet alone, it’s easy to see why people think this giant bird is directly descended from dinosaurs such as velociraptors. They are the third largest bird species in the ...

Armed with the ability to accept all cells as its own, comb jellies can merge with others to survive. Here’s how it works. On a quiet summer day at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, ...

A newly identified sponge order, Vilesida, produces sterols linked to the oldest-known animal biomarkers, supporting the idea ...

Scientists have long puzzled over how pterosaurs became the first vertebrates to master flight. Some pterosaur species, such as the Quetzalcoatlus were the largest known animals to ever take to the ...

Deep inside ancient caves, humans painted their world. Animals they hunted. Scenes from daily life. Moments they understood. But one image stands out. A creature—unlike anything we know— shown ...

A groundbreaking new study from Bar-Ilan University shows that one of sleep's core functions originated hundreds of millions of years ago in jellyfish and sea anemones, among the earliest creatures ...