Explore the history of life on Earth, from 3.5-billion-year-old fossils to the vast diversity of species on our planet today.

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Microscopic image showing newly discovered Asgard archaeon (_Nerearchaeum marumarumayae_) derived from microbial mats that offers ...

The 1999 paper suggested that complex organisms existed 2.7 billion years ago, 900 million years before the next oldest contenders. New research, published this morning in the journal PNAS, has ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: The first eukaryotes—the cells that form complex life—likely originated when two microscopic entities merged via a process called endosymbiosis, ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Asgard microbes were found in shallow coastal sediments off the coast of Uruguay. - Monika Naranjo-Shepard/Schmidt Ocean Institute ...

More than 1,200 metres deep in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Japan lies an underwater volcano named Myojin Knoll. A team of Japanese biologists have been trawling these waters for more than a ...

When a black rock glinting in the harsh light of Western Australia's outback caught Erica Barlow's eye, she had no idea its contents dated back more than two billion years. The University of New South ...

The history of the first plant on Earth is not as simple as the identification of a particular species of plants, but it is a long history of evolution that started in the water and changed the planet ...

On the shores of the west coast of Australia lies a window to our past: the stromatolites and microbial mats of Gathaagudu (Shark Bay). To the untrained eye they look like a collection of rocks and ...

Scientists reveal a crucial link between ancient microbes in Shark Bay and the origins of complex life, offering insights ...