An "extraordinary" species of fossil sponge dating back 315 million years has been discovered near the Cliffs of Moher in County Clare. The fossil sponge, named Cyathophycus balori, measures 50cm and ...

Prof. YUAN Xunlai from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and his team have discovered a late Ediacaran crown-group sponge, Helicolocellus, from the ...

Geobiologists reported a 550 million-year-old sea sponge that had been missing from the fossil record. The discovery sheds new light on a conundrum that has stumped zoologists and paleontologists for ...

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. The newly identified chemical ...

Molecular clocks, which use the mutation rate of biomolecules to deduce how long ago two species diverged, and phylogenetics (the evolutionary relationships between species) can tell us when sea ...

At first glance, the simple sea sponge is no creature of mystery. No brain. No gut. No problem dating it back 700 million years. Yet convincing sponge fossils only go back about 540 million years, ...

A 550-million-year-old fossil found along the Yangtze River may explain why Earth's earliest animals left almost no trace ...