The sun has just set on a quiet mudflat in Australia’s Northern Territory; it’ll set again in another 19 hours. A young moon looms large over the desolate landscape. No animals scurry in the waning ...
Newly discovered biomarker signatures point to a whole range of previously unknown organisms that dominated complex life on Earth about a billion years ago. They differed from complex eukaryotic life ...
Scientists are trying to understand how complex life emerged on Earth about 2 billion years ago. Our microbial ancestors could be the key.
Before Neanderthals and Denisovans, before vaguely humanoid primates, proto-mammals, or fish that crawled out of the ocean to become the first terrestrial animals, our earliest ancestors were microbes ...
Life on earth is rich with diversity, and while we know a lot about some organisms, there is still so much more to learn. Researchers have started using genetic tools to fill in some of the gaps in ...
Our single-celled ancestor lived in a world without plants, animals or oxygen-rich oceans. Yet, this seemingly simple microorganism took the first steps toward complex life. From this ancestor emerged ...
In the beginning, there was boredom. Following the emergence of cellular life on earth, some 3.5 billion years ago, simple cells lacking a nucleus and other detailed internal structure dominated the ...
Scientists are one step closer to understanding the origins of complex life on Earth after shedding new light on a mystery about our microbial ancestors. The key, they suspect, may lie in how simple ...
Researchers have discovered the first in-situ evidence of chlorophyll remnants in a billion-year-old multicellular algal microfossil preserved in shales from the Congo Basin. This discovery has made ...
Long before plants and animals existed, Earth was dominated by microscopic organisms called prokaryotes. They lived simple, single-celled lives, soaking up nutrients in the oceans billions of years ...
A new study challenges a popular scenario put forward to explain the arrival of the first eukaryotic organisms. In the beginning, there was boredom. Following the emergence of cellular life on earth, ...