Life’s leap from single-celled to multicellular organisms marks a pivotal moment in evolutionary history. This transformation laid the foundation for the complex life forms we see today. By studying ...

Around 700 million years ago, Earth was a frozen, white sphere, its rocky surface buried kilometers under ice. Despite the barren landscape, the evolution of complex life in the oceans was about to ...

Exceptionally preserved fossils from the Ediacaran period challenge what scientists thought was possible in sandstone. In the fossil record, creatures without hard shells or skeletons, such as ...

Ten years ago, nobody knew that Asgard archaea even existed. In 2015, however, researchers examining deep-sea sediments discovered gene fragments that indicated a new and previously undiscovered form ...

Decades of research has viewed DNA as a sequence-based instruction manual; yet every cell in the body shares the same genes – so where is the language that writes the memory of cell identities?

Mysterious microbes living in wetlands in China have helped to narrow down when the ancestor of all animals and plants lived – and the oxygenation of Earth’s atmosphere may have played a key role in ...

In many submerged regions, murky mud shelters strange life-forms that seem to be the key to one of the biggest mysteries of life on Earth. These creatures belong to a domain of life called the archaea ...

New work shows that physical folding of the genome to control genes located far away may have been a critical turning point for life on Earth. For evolutionary biologists, what most distinguishes the ...

In his laboratory at the University of Poitiers in France, Abderrazak El Albani contemplates the rock glittering in his hands. To the untrained eye, the specimen resembles a piece of golden tortellini ...