A team led by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin has produced what may be the strongest evidence yet that the ancient ancestors of all complex life on Earth already had the genes to use ...

Life on Earth began simply. For billions of years, tiny microbes ruled the planet. Then, one day in deep time, something changed. Cells gained a nucleus, built inner compartments and learned to ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. A massive fossil discovery in southwest China has shifted our understanding of when complex animals first appeared on Earth.

On the shores of the west coast of Australia lies a window to our past: the stromatolites and microbial mats of Gathaagudu ...

New evidence from rocks, molecules and machine learning is forcing scientists to redraw the opening chapters of Earth’s story, pushing the first stirrings of biology far closer to the planet’s violent ...

Stromatolites—and their close relatives, microbial mats—could be mistaken for what seems like a bunch of old dark rocks. But ...