The Cambrian explosion may have been fueled by poop. The first animals on Earth emerged about 600 million years ago, and 60 million years later, those simple early animals evolved into wildly ...

Fossilized feces may have helped fuel the Cambrian Explosion by moving nutrients and organic matter through ancient oceans as ...

That’s the premise of a paper published earlier this month in Trends in Ecology & Evolution. The research began as an effort to categorize known examples of fossilized poop, or coprolites, from both ...

Around 540 million years ago, the biological landscape of Earth went through a huge transformation called the Cambrian ...

In the first 20 million years of the Cambrian period, Earth experienced an explosion of life—a great evolutionary era dubbed ...

But now, a review study published today in Trends in Ecology & Evolution hypothesizes that the ecosystem overhaul was also fueled by an explosion of poop.  In a modern ocean, animal excrement is a key ...

Is it the theory of evo-poo-tion? While poop may seem like a revolting subject, it could could also be responsible for life ...

Animal life is extraordinarily diverse and complex, having colonised almost all environments on Earth – from hostile hydrothermal vents in the deep sea to the skies across our continents. But all this ...

A newly discovered trove of fossils in southwestern China is shifting the timeline of when complex animals evolved. The diversity and complexity of animal life is thought to have increased rapidly ...

Our new research suggests the evolution of fecal matter helped fuel one of the most important events in the history of life on Earth: the Cambrian explosion ...

An international study led by Flinders University has found a fertile area of inspiration to explain an important step in ...

For decades, scientists have wondered what triggered the sudden "explosion" of complex animal life on Earth. This new hypothesis suggests that the answer isn't found in shells or legs, but in the ...