In a new study researchers say that a cut sample of the creature, a species called Psolus fabricii ( Sea Cucumber), has survived for three years while being kept in natural seawater, growing and repairing all on its own.
Beneath a crater gouged by a massive impact around 42,000 years ago, several stromatolites were identified. This discovery suggests that the heat generated by the impact may have created a hydrothermal environment.
A newly dicovered archaeon from Shark Bay may preserve clues to the partnerships that helped complex life began.
Life may have started in sticky, rock-hugging gels rather than inside cells. Researchers suggest these primitive, biofilm-like materials could trap and concentrate molecules, giving early chemistry a protected space to grow more complex.
78 million years ago, a 1.6 km asteroid slammed into what is now Finland, creating a crater 23 km (14 mi) wide and 750 m deep. The catastrophic impact created a fractured hydrothermal system in the shattered bedrock under the crater.
At 11.1 square kilometers (4.3 square miles), the newly discovered hydrothermal field is over a hundred times larger than its Atlantic counterpart.
Within a tiny plankton, an even smaller cell has been found living an unexpectedly virus-like existence, challenging what it means to be alive.
Researchers from Germany have simulated ancient environment in a vial, and found that archaic life forms that live in the deep sea today can thrive under these primordial conditions.
An astronomer at Columbia University is suggesting that because life emerged so soon on Earth after its formation, it may emerge rapidly on Earth-like planets after the right conditions arise in general.
An international collaboration has published groundbreaking research, shedding light on the most significant increase in complexity in the history of life's evolution on Earth: the origin of the eukaryotic cell.
The fact that this bacteria so closely resembles that transition point, from two single cells with different genetics to one inseparable cluster, is fascinating: embryo comparisons have provided many clues about our evolutionary history.
Scientists have uncovered a surprising role for calcium in shaping the building blocks of life.
New research out of Stanford University adds a “striking” new twist to an existing theory about how life may have began on our planet, involving the occurrence of microlightning in tiny water droplets.
Hundreds of millions of years ago, rocks crushed under kilometres of ice injected vital nutrients into Earth's oceans.
In 1983, the theoretical physicist Brandon Carter concluded that the time it took for humans to evolve on Earth -- relative to the total lifespan of the Sun - suggests that our evolutionary origin was intrinsically unlikely.
