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 ...

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 ...

Scientists have uncovered chemical evidence of life in rocks over 3.3 billion years old. Using artificial intelligence (AI), they’ve detected faint “whispers” of biological activity, revealing that ...

Scientists have discovered that complex life began evolving much earlier than traditional models suggested. Using an expanded molecular clock approach, the team showed that crucial cellular features ...

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 ...

Complex life began to develop earlier, and over a longer span of time, than previously believed, a new study has revealed. The research sheds new light on the conditions needed for early organisms to ...

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?

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 ...

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 ...

During Earth's ancient Snowball periods, when the entire planet was wrapped in ice, life may have endured in tiny meltwater ponds on the surface of equatorial glaciers. MIT researchers discovered that ...

A tiny amoeba has broken a pretty big record. The newly discovered species of single-celled organism can divide and reproduce at a piping hot 63 degrees Celsius (145 degrees Fahrenheit), higher than ...