Around half a billion years ago, in what is now the Yunnan Province of China, a tiny larva was trapped in mud. Hundreds of millions of years later, after the mud had long since become the black shales ...

You might not realize that all around you, an amazing show is going on. Many arthropods (insects, spiders, and relatives) have a secret: They glow under ultraviolet light. Lightning bugs and other ...

Newly discovered fossils fill a gap in scientists’ knowledge of how arthropods evolved their legs. The extinct creatures’ limblike flaps represent a stage before the two parts fused into the limbs ...

A team of scientists have discovered an ancient arthropod that may show the origins of branched limbs and the first gill-like breathing structures in the clade. When researchers working in ...

Exquisitely preserved fossils left behind by creatures living more than half a billion years ago reveal in great detail identical structures that researchers have long hypothesized must have ...

Animals “discovered” land well over 450 million years ago. Arthropods (joint-footed) are the earliest known terrestrial animals. The evidence lies in the fossilized trackways of some type of arthropod ...

Some of the first creatures to leave the ocean and venture onto land may have done so by carrying a bit of the sea with them: Fossil trackways left on ancient tidal flats 500 million years ago hint ...

home, they are immensely outnumbered by tiny arthropods, such as insects, spiders and millipedes. In the past, scientists had trouble estimating how many arthropods exist in the vastness of a forest.

Bacterial community composition in blood-sucking arthropods can shift dramatically across time and space. We used 16S rRNA gene amplification and pyrosequencing to investigate the relative impact of ...