Complex cells are thought to be the result of a union between two ancient microorganisms, but scientists have long been ...

A team led by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin has produced what may be the strongest evidence yet that the ...

Oxygen played a key role in the evolution of complex organisms, according to new research published in BMC Evolutionary Biology. The study shows that the complexity of life forms increased earlier ...

A giant virus discovered in Japan is adding fuel to the provocative idea that viruses helped create complex life. Named ushikuvirus, it infects amoebae and shows unique traits that connect different ...

STARKVILLE, Miss.—Mississippi State biologist Matthew W. Brown, the university’s Donald L. Hall Professor of Biology, is part of an international research team whose groundbreaking discovery is ...

Researchers investigating the origin of complex life on Earth might have just made a major breakthrough. The origin of humanity and the planet Earth is probably debated more than whether the chicken ...

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 ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Far from being solo operators, most single-celled microbes are in complex relationships. In the ocean, the soil, and your gut, they ...

Life on Earth began in a way that still boggles the mind. Around 4.5 billion years ago, a chemical process called abiogenesis ...

Around 700 million years ago, Earth was a frozen, white sphere, its rocky surface buried kilometers under ice. Despite the barren landscape, the evolution of complex life in the oceans was about to ...

Life on Earth may exist thanks to a brief faltering in our planet's protective magnetic field shell, scientists have found. A bizarre drop in the strength of the magnetic field has been found to have ...

A biochemist, building on the pillars of evolutionary theory and drawing on cutting-edge research into the link between energy and genes, argues that the evolution of multicellular life was the result ...