In a February 1, 1871, letter to his best friend, botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, Charles Darwin suggested a warm little pond was the site where primitive life first arose.¹ But the place, time, and conditions of such a pond remain unknown.

In 2006 a story broke that a Kurdish family in southern Turkey had a number of their members that walked on their palms. This caused excitement among some in the evolutionary community because they thought this was a throwback to our primate ancestors.¹

There is nothing simple about an animal group called the euarthropods (phylum Euarthropoda), which includes insects, crustaceans, and extinct trilobites.