Sponges are among Earth's most ancient animals, but exactly when they evolved has long puzzled scientists. Genetic ...

After studying rocks more than 541 million years old, MIT scientists have found new evidence that some of Earth’s first ...

A team of MIT geochemists has unearthed new evidence in very old rocks suggesting that some of the first animals on Earth were likely ancestors of the modern sea sponge. Subscribe to our newsletter ...

Simple animal life may have existed in Earth’s oceans 890 million years ago, according to new research. Recently discovered fossils belonging to ancient sponges might be the earliest known remnants of ...

Long before dinosaurs, trilobites, or even jellyfish swam the seas, Earth’s oceans were filled with creatures that looked like squishy tubes or blobs. They had no bones, no shells, and no nervous ...

Scientists predict that sponges—among the most basic animals—arose a few hundred million years before the occurrence of the oldest confirmed fossil specimens, which date to about 500 million years ago ...

Deep beneath the ice-encrusted Arctic seas near the North Pole, atop an inactive deep-sea volcano, a community of sea sponges has survived for centuries by eating the fossils of ancient extinct worms.

The function of dissepiments and marginaria in the Rugosa (Cnidaria, Zoantharia) / J.E. Sorauf -- Axial increase in some early tabulate corals / D.-J. Lee ... [et al.] -- Biometric analysis of ...

In the cold, dark depths of the Arctic Ocean, a feast of the dead is under way. A vast community of sponges, the densest group of these animals found in the Arctic, is consuming the remains of an ...