It’s pretty hard to find a fossil of something that’s completely squishy and tiny. Without bones or exoskeletons, there’s not a lot from many microorganisms that gets preserved. But a 200-million year ...

About 200 million years ago, a leech released a slimy mucous cocoon that unwittingly encased and trapped a bizarre animal with a springy tail, preserving it until researchers discovered the ...

Move over amber. When it comes to preserving soft-bodied animals through the ages, there’s a newcomer in town: fossilised leech “cocoons”. The cocoons are secreted by many leech and worm species ...

The frequent presence of leeches with a hidden lifestyle in the mantle cavity of freshwater mussels has been recorded since the second half of the 19th century. Yet this was, until now, regarded as an ...

A new report in the journal Nature unveils three of the first genomes from a vast, understudied swath of the animal kingdom that includes as many as one-quarter of ...