The origins of complex, nucleated cellular life – everything from amoebas to humans – may date back a lot further in Earth's history than we thought. A new study tracing the earliest steps toward ...

Mars was not always the cold desert we see today. Billions of years ago, volcanoes built a thick atmosphere and water flowed ...

Scientists have traced the origins of complex life to the breakup of the supercontinent Nuna 1.5 billion years ago. This tectonic shift reduced volcanic carbon emissions, expanded shallow seas, and ...

The curious minds at What If discover what Earth was like 2 billion years ago, exploring early life, atmosphere, and continental formation.

The Great Oxygenation Event marked a massive transition in life on Earth, when oxygen became plentiful and organisms suddenly had to adapt. Current conditions in Japanese hot springs give clues as to ...

Earth's earliest life left behind very few chemical traces. Fragile remains, like ancient cells and microbial mats, were buried, squeezed, heated, and broken apart by the planet's shifting crust ...

MSU researcher Katie Maloney contributed samples of rare, exceptionally well-preserved seaweed fossils (e.g., macroscopic algae) from Yukon Territory, Canada. These fossils are almost one-billion ...

Parts of ancient Earth may have formed continents and recycled crust through subduction far earlier than previously thought.

All life on Earth shares a common ancestor that lived roughly four billion years ago. This so-called "last universal common ...

A machine-learning-enhanced approach to chemical analysis is drastically expanding the chemical record of life on Earth, and it could help us find evidence of life on other planets too. Reading time 3 ...

New method also detects molecular signs of photosynthesis almost 1 billion years earlier than previously documented; Combining chemistry and AI, pioneering method could revolutionize search for ...

A 2.5-billion-year-old rock from South Africa's Gamohaan Formation. AI analysis suggests the dark structures preserved in the rock are the remains of a complex microbial community. Pairing ...