Fossilized skeletons and shells clearly show how evolution and extinction unfolded over the past half a billion years, but a new analysis extends the chart of life to nearly 2 billion years ago.
Life on Earth may have developed the ability to form embryos even before it grew the very first animals.
Today, Antarctica is a huge frozen continent, though it was once temperate enough to be covered in swampy forests. Now, a team of scientists has discovered fossilized tree resin—amber—on the continent for the first time.
Some 3.26 billion years ago a giant rock between 50 and 200 times the size of the Chicxulub dino-killer smacked into our planet. The result of this impact may have churned up nutrients that gave a select few early microbes a boost.
Now, scientists have discovered evidence of Earth's transition from a tropical underwater world, writhing with photosynthetic bacteria, to a frozen wasteland – all preserved within the layers of giant rocks in a chain of Scottish and Irish islands.
A new study has found that life on Earth emerged surprisingly early. Scientists have determined that the last universal common ancestor (LUCA), the first organism that spawned all the life that exists today on Earth, emerged as early as 4.2 billion years ago.
New research provides the clearest evidence yet that the Cambrian explosion - a rapid burst of evolution 540 million years ago, could have been triggered by only a small increase in oxygen levels in Earth's atmosphere and shallow ocean waters.
Our planet was born around 4.5 billion years ago. To understand this mind-bendingly long history, we need to study rocks and the minerals they are made of. In a new study, evidence of rocks of a similar age were found in Australia.
The hunt for the origin of garnet crystals found on South Australian beaches took researchers thousands of kilometres and half a billion years back in time to a hidden Antarctic mountain range.
An international scientific team has redefined our understanding of archaea, a microbial ancestor to humans from two billion years ago, by showing how they use hydrogen gas.
Geoscientists show that rocks from the Isua Supracrustal Belt in West Greenland have experienced three thermal events throughout their geological history.
Prehistoric marine worms may have made an outsized contribution to the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event.
New research finds Earth's surface was first sprinkled with fresh water some 4 billion years ago, a whole 500 million years earlier than previously thought.
On the scale of cataclysmic events, the whomping impact of a Mars-sized object that crashed into Earth some 4.5 billion years ago ranks pretty highly: thought to have set in motion the movement of our planet's fractured, rocky crust.
Earth's magnetic field nearly collapsed some 590 million years ago, presumably putting life on the planet's surface at risk of a rise in cosmic radiation.
