Photograph by Joel Sartore, National Geographic Photo Ark The earliest multicelled animals that survived the Precambrian fall into three main categories. The simplest of these soft-bodied ...

So what exactly were these highly diverse Precambrian creatures? Plants, animals, or of another kingdom entirely? Nearly all scientists today agree that they were soft-bodied marine-dwelling animals.

Nevertheless, their proliferation “set the stage” for the animal kingdom to evolve before they died out, the researchers wrote in a new report, published in the journal Precambrian Research.

In a study published in Precambrian Research Monday by scientists ... from simple single-cell organisms to complex organisms like animals and plants,” Dr. Ernest Chi Fru, lead author of the ...

All animal evolution for the last half billion ... It has long been suspected that the sparseness of the pre-Cambrian fossil record reflects these two problems. First, organisms may not have ...