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Trees are believed to have originated hundreds of millions of years ago. Ever since, evidence of these ancient plant sentinels has been in short supply. Now, a new discovery of uniquely 3D tree fossils has opened a window into what the world was like when the planet’s early forests were beginning to evolve, expanding our understanding of the architecture of trees throughout Earth’s history.

The brain has been hiding inside a fossil fish skull and it's now revealing secrets of animal evolution. Illustration of a small gray fish with a dark stripe down its side with an extra bit showing what its little pink brain looked like.This artist's rendering shows what Coccocephalus wildi might have looked like back when it lived over 300 million years ago. - Márcio L. Castro A very long time ago, a fish died, was buried in sediments and eventually became fossilized. Today, 319 million years later, it's the star of a study that reveals "the oldest example of a...

And it could shed light on our distant evolution. Says the co-author of a study on the fossilized organ: "We are all related, in the most literal sense." Professor Kate Trinajstic inspects a fossil of an ancient fish at the Western Australian Museum. Curtin University A 380 million-year-old fish heart found embedded in a chunk of Australian sediment has scientists' pulses racing. Not only is this organ in remarkable condition, but it could also yield clues about the evolution of jawed vertebrates, which include you and me. The heart belonged to an extinct class of armored, jawed fish called arthrodires...

A symbiotic relationship between two marine lifeforms has just been discovered thriving at the bottom of the ocean, after disappearing from the fossil record for hundreds of millions of years. Scientists have found non-skeletal corals growing from the stalks of marine animals known as crinoids, or sea lilies, on the floor of the Pacific Ocean, off the coasts of Honshu and Shikoku in Japan. "These specimens represent the first detailed records and examinations of a recent syn vivo association of a crinoid (host) and a hexacoral (epibiont)," the researchers wrote in their paper, "and therefore analyses of these associations can...