Life on Earth reached a decisive turning point about 2.6 billion years ago. An international team of researchers has just ...

How did the complex organisms on Earth arise? This is one of the big open questions in biology. A collaboration between the working groups of Christa Schleper at the University of Vienna and ...

Several key moments in Earth's history help us humans answer the question "How did we get here?" These moments also shed ...

A new study reveals that the aerobic nitrogen cycle in the ocean may have occurred about 100 million years before oxygen began to significantly accumulate in the atmosphere, based on nitrogen isotope ...

“We have this idea that this was a fairly complex organism, already possibly by the time of like 4.2 billion years ago.” Scientists as far back as biologist Charles Darwin have proposed that ...

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But scientists have found that a more complex organism — a single-celled alga with a nucleus — can do it, too, thanks to a newly identified piece of cellular architecture. They're calling it ...

"The availability of phosphorus in the environment is thought to be a key component in the evolution of life on Earth, especially in the transition from simple single-cell organisms to complex ...

Earth’s earliest forms of life, such as microbes, cyanobacteria, sponges and seafloor-dwelling organisms, populated the oceans. After the end of the Neoproterozoic came the rise of more complex ...

The findings support the idea that it was more of a "Slushball Earth" where the earliest forms of complex life - basic multicellular organisms - endured even at mid-latitudes previously thought to ...