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 ...

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 ...

When thinking about the ancient animals of Earth, you likely picture fish, birds, and dinosaurs. But a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the ...

Most sea sponges are simple, yet ancient, animals that live in coral reef ecosystems. They feed by passively filtering ocean water, taking in microscopic debris such as bacteria, plankton, and other ...

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 ...