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 ...

Marine heat is rising so fast that a single extra degree could push some of the ocean’s oldest animals past their limit. New work from researchers at the Australian Institute of Marine Science ...

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 ...

Inside deep-sea coral in the Pacific, an iridescent creature waits in ambush. Zhou Y, Zhang R, Shen C, Mao Q, Zhang M, Zhang D (2025) ZooKeys The underwater mountains of the northwest Pacific are ...

For almost two decades, scientists have debated whether sponges or comb jellies are the first animal lineage. Now some are ...

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 ...

SpongeBob SquarePants and his starfish best friend, Patrick Star, aren’t such cartoonish creatures after all. According to an image taken by a marine biologist doing remote deep-sea exploration this ...

Girolline, a compound extracted from the sea sponge Pseudaxinyssa cantharella, has been investigated for possible antitumor effects and also found to have anti-malarial effects. Now, researchers have ...

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. In a study appearing today in ...