About 4 billion years ago, Earth began to show signs of the conditions that allowed the first cells to take hold and populate ...

Chengdu University of Technology-led research has established a high-resolution astrochronological framework spanning ...

Life on Earth had to begin somewhere, and scientists think that “somewhere” is LUCA—or the Last Universal Common Ancestor.

Earth’s earliest forms of life ... After the end of the Neoproterozoic came the rise of more complex life, with the first appearance of marine creatures sporting armor, shells and spikes.

Single-celled organisms that group together can generate stronger water currents to pull in food, a benefit that may have ...

New research suggests “microlightning” exchanges among water droplets in Earth’s early atmosphere may have sparked the ...

Tiny magnetic bacteria that live in tightly bound groups are showing scientists how life might have evolved complex, multicellular forms. These rare bacteria can’t survive alone – they depend on one ...

But real lightning would have struck infrequently—and mostly in open ocean, where organic compounds would have quickly ...

The building blocks of life on Earth may have been ... Most of the available information suggests that early Earth didn't have a huge supply of these complex molecules, if any at all, but it ...

While the Cambrian Explosion kickstarted complex life in a major way some ... To zero in on exactly when LUCA appeared on Earth, scientists had to work backward. First, the team compared genes ...