Sponges may be ancient, but their timeline has been murky. New research suggests the earliest sponges were soft and skeleton-free, explaining why their fossils don’t appear until much later. By ...

In March, I visited the Lowell Observatory — the astronomical research site where Pluto was first discovered — in Flagstaff, Arizona. I stood in line to squint through telescopes at Jupiter and the ...

Scientists at MIT have found compelling chemical evidence that Earth’s earliest animals were likely ancient sea sponges. Hidden inside rocks over 541 million years old are rare molecular “fingerprints ...