(Kimmig & Bicknell, Trends Ecol. Evol., 2026) We may owe our very existence to an ancient poop explosion. If the earliest animals hadn't been such prolific poopers, life might not have diversified ...

Called the Cambrian explosion, scientists have no idea why it happened. “We see the first evidence of basically every major animal group all pop into existence,” says Karma Nanglu, a paleontologist ...

In the first 20 million years of the Cambrian period, Earth experienced an explosion of life—a great evolutionary era dubbed ...

That’s the premise of a paper published earlier this month in Trends in Ecology & Evolution. The research began as an effort to categorize known examples of fossilized poop, or coprolites, from both ...

Is it the theory of evo-poo-tion? While poop may seem like a revolting subject, it could could also be responsible for life ...

Known as the Cambrian Explosion, this flurry of rapid evolution produced most of the animal phyla and ecosystems we see around us today. And it may have taken off because some of those early animals ...

But now, a review study published today in Trends in Ecology & Evolution hypothesizes that the ecosystem overhaul was also fueled by an explosion of poop.  In a modern ocean, animal excrement is a key ...

Life as we know it wouldn’t be what is today without a lot of poop. In fact, Earth may have never hosted any life at all ...

As all children learn, everyone poos. But when did this begin? And what evolutionary and environmental changes accompanied ...

Our new research suggests the evolution of fecal matter helped fuel one of the most important events in the history of life on Earth: the Cambrian explosion ...