All life on Earth can be traced back to a Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA—and it likely lived on Earth only 400 ...

About 700 million years ago, enormous glaciers flowed across the Earth's surface in powerful frozen rivers like "giant ice bulldozers" that pulverized our planet's crust and may have contributed to ...

One key component might be RNA, a molecular cousin of DNA found in every form of life on Earth, and now scientists say they ...

DNA from Icelandic lava flows reveals how microbes move into a brand-new habitat, offering insights into early life on Earth ...

Four billion years ago, Earth was violent, hot, and unstable. Yet new research suggests that by then, life had already reached a surprising level of complexity. At that time lived the last universal ...

Between a rock and a green place: Michelle Gehringer studies fossilized life on early Earth to learn more about the evolution of (oxygenic) photosynthesis - the process that makes the oxygen we breath ...

People have long wondered what life was first like on Earth, and if there is life in our solar system beyond our planet. Scientists have reason to believe that some of the moons in our solar system – ...

The question of when life began on Earth is as old as human culture. “It’s one of these fundamental human questions: When did life appear on Earth?” said Professor Martin Whitehouse of the Swedish ...

Over 500 million years ago, during the Cambrian period, all major animal phyla appeared rapidly in what is known as the Cambrian explosion, which established a completely new Earth-life system. This ...

Introduction : The coherence of history / Stephen Jay Gould -- The planetary setting of prebiotic evolution / Sherwood Chang -- Early environments : constraints and opportunities for early evolution / ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. We’ve pieced together a remarkably detailed timeline of ...