To find out if we are alone in the galaxy, we will need to better understand what geochemical conditions nurtured the first life forms. What water, chemistry and temperature cycles fostered the ...

These mysterious forms, first identified through cutting-edge genetic analysis, challenge existing definitions of life and raise questions about what else might be lurking unseen within us.

The first multicelled animals appeared in the fossil record almost 600 million years ago. Known as the Ediacarans, these bizarre creatures bore little resemblance to modern life-forms. They grew ...

What is the true longest-living life-form? Tortoises, whales, and trees are all likely to be the winners. However, some microscopic species are the answer for this. They have been alive since befo ...

we’re still not sure exactly how our planet’s first life forms were created. It’s possible, many scientists say, that life on Earth may have originated elsewhere. Right now, the leading ...

Fungi were some of the first complex life forms on land, mining rocks for mineral nourishment, slowly turning them into what would become soil. In the Late Ordovician era, they formed a symbiotic ...

From 4.6 billion years ago when the Earth was red hot, the timeline illustrates the evolution of the first life forms through to plants photosynthesising, bacterial evolution, marine life ...

Once simple life emerged, it gradually evolved into more complex forms, eventually giving rise to animals and plants. But that doesn’t seem to be what happened. After simple cells first appeared ...

We know that Darwinian evolution acts on all forms of life, but does evolution act on non-living materials as well? In a paper, titled "Competitive exclusion among self-replicating molecules ...

First, he had traced the evolution of cellular ... biologists used the sequences of multiple genomes of diverse life-forms to construct and compare thousands of phylogenetic trees for individual ...

Before plants ruled, Earth may have glowed violet. The first life forms used retinal instead of chlorophyll, absorbing green light and reflecting red and blue—turning the planet an eerie purple.