Around 2.3 billion years ago, the Great Oxygenation Event (GOE) marked a major turning point in Earth’s history. The increase ...

Fossilized remnants of ancient carbon from the heart of South Africa's Mpumalanga province have just yielded the earliest chemical evidence yet of life on Earth. According to a new analysis using ...

Houchin and his colleagues studied dozens of zircon crystals from the Jack Hills in Western Australia. These are the oldest ...

Around 1.7 billion years ago, eukaryotes—the building blocks of complex life—first appeared on Earth, and now scientists have ...

Deep in some of Earth’s oldest rocks, traces of ancient life still linger, even when every cell has crumbled. You would not see shells, bones, or clear microfossils in these rocks. Instead, you would ...

Scientists discovered a previously hidden ecosystem - lagoons in Argentina's Puna de Atacama harbors microbial communities, ...

How did life begin on Earth? While scientists have theories, they don't yet fully understand the precise chemical steps that led to biology, or when the first primitive life forms appeared. But what ...

New research shows that early land plants started influencing Earth’s climate hundreds of millions of years earlier than ...

New research shows that the earliest sponges were soft bodied and lacked skeletons, explaining why their oldest fossils are ...