Here is what you’ll learn in this story: Panspermia is the controversial theory that life evolved elsewhere in the universe and—some way or another—made it here, where it developed into the diversity ...

Earth’s earliest microbes may have built vital chemistry around molybdenum, a metal thought too scarce to matter in ancient ...

Living organisms share an ancestor called the last universal common ancestor, or LUCA. LUCA is estimated to have lived approximately four billion years ago. All plants, animals, and microbes can trace ...

The Canadian fossils belong to the White Sea group. But they appear to be around 567 million years old – 5 to 10 million ...

On Earth, life thrives in some of the most seemingly inhospitable environments. Single-celled organisms like bacteria teem in the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park, where temperatures reach ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: All life on Earth can be traced back to a Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA. A study suggests that this organism likely lived on Earth only 400 ...

On the shores of the west coast of Australia lies a window to our past: the stromatolites and microbial mats of Gathaagudu (Shark Bay). To the untrained eye, they look like a collection of rocks and ...

A giant impact on the early Earth could have brought the building blocks of RNA to our planet, which new research suggests could have quickly formed in the presence of compounds called borates. When ...

On the shores of the west coast of Australia lies a window to our past: the stromatolites and microbial mats of Gathaagudu (Shark Bay). To the untrained eye they look like a collection of rocks and ...