Around 1.7 billion years ago, eukaryotes—the building blocks of complex life—first appeared on Earth, and now scientists have ...

The most widely accepted scientific explanation for the arrival of all complex life on Earth has had an unsolved mystery at its heart. According to the theory, all plants, animals and fungi, known ...

Researchers investigating the origin of complex life on Earth might have just made a major breakthrough. The origin of humanity and the planet Earth is probably debated more than whether the chicken ...

Prokaryotic cells, which include all bacteria and archaea, are ancient, and relatively simple compared to eukaryotic cells, which are found in fungi, plants, and animals. Scientists have long sought ...

In the oceans and on land, scientists are discovering rare, transitional organisms that bridge the gap between Earth’s simplest cells and today’s complex ones.

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 ...

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 ...

Ancient microbes tied to our earliest ancestors could use oxygen, reshaping ideas about how complex life began on Earth.

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For decades, scientists have believed that complex life began when two very different microbes joined forces, eventually ...

A newly discovered promoter element "start" points to a shared regulatory syntax for controlling transcription initiation in bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes. DNA is often described as the language ...