An ancient, armored worm may be the key to unraveling the evolutionary history of a diverse collection of marine invertebrates. Discovered in China, a roughly 520-million-year-old fossil of the newly ...

Two species of worms have retained remarkably similar patterns in the way they switch their genes on and off despite having split from a common ancestor 20 million years ago, a new study finds. The ...

From elaborate dances to stunning plumage displays to dramatic head-butting, male animals have an array of ways to distinguish themselves from competitors while wooing a potential mate. But it's not ...

New research is shaking up our understanding of evolution by revealing that some species may not evolve gradually at all. Instead, scientists discovered that certain marine worms experienced an ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. When picturing a predator, most people envision an animal ...

It’s a small, fleshy creature, no more than an inch in length, with elongated spines and menacing pharyngeal teeth used to crush food. It lived in muddy shallow waters some hundreds of millions of ...

Ashleigh Papp: This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science, I'm Ashleigh Papp. You might say that Guillermo Ponz is a scientific monster hunter–even though he thinks that term, “monster” never ...

Ancient fossils have shed new light on a type of sea worm linking it to the time of an evolutionary explosion that gave rise to modern animal life. Researchers at Durham University, UK, and Northwest ...