Wild dolphins use sea sponges as tools to hunt safely, revealing how animal culture survives despite hidden sensory costs.

The ocean is full of surprises, and scientists are still finding creatures that seem almost unreal. From tiny reef animals to ...

A rare chemical indicator suggests sponges may have arrived as the first animals on Earth. A sterol core is primarily composed of four fused carbon rings, along with carbon side chains and other ...

A team of scientists digging up some of the Earth’s oldest rocks has uncovered new chemical evidence that Earth’s first animals were likely ancestors of the modern sea sponge. The discovery relies on ...

The missing link in the mystery turned out to be an event called the Cambrian explosion. It was only after it that living ...

Virginia Tech geobiologist Shuhai Xiao and collaborators reported a 550 million-year-old sea sponge fossil, filling in a gap in the evolutionary family tree of one of the earliest animals. Photo by ...

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 ...

Scientists found “massive” plant-covered sea animals at South Pacific reef and discovered a new species, a study said. Photo shows a representative island in French Polynesia. Photo from Gabor Koszegi ...

Biological systems are renowned for their ability to create strong yet resilient structures. A sea sponge, for instance, grows in layers, forming unique patterns that integrate minerals with softer ...