For billions of years after the origin of life, the only living things on Earth were tiny, primitive cells resembling today’s bacteria. But then, more than 1.5 billion years ago, something remarkable ...

In many submerged regions, murky mud shelters strange life-forms that seem to be the key to one of the biggest mysteries of life on Earth. These creatures belong to a domain of life called the archaea ...

Scientists have identified tubulin structures in primitive Asgard archea that may have been the precursor of our own cellular skeletons. In 2010, biologists made a shocking discovery. Living in the ...

The origin of organisms with complex cells, known as eukaryotes, is one of the most crucial parts of life’s evolutionary story. All animals, plants, and fungi are eukaryotes, and if complex cells had ...

Molecules found in 1.6-billion-year-old Australian rocks are believed to be remnants of a “lost world” of ancient organisms that comprised the earliest complex life. “We say they are a lost world, ...