CELEBRATED palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould once wondered what would happen if we could rewind the tape of life. If it were possible to turn the clock back half a billion years and then let evolution ...

We have only one example of biology forming in the universe – life on Earth. But what if life can form in other ways? How do you look for alien life when you don’t know what alien life might look like ...

Humanity may not be extraordinary but rather the natural evolutionary outcome for our planet and likely others, according to a new model for how intelligent life developed on Earth. The model, which ...

Oxygen played a key role in the evolution of complex organisms, according to new research published in BMC Evolutionary Biology. The study shows that the complexity of life forms increased earlier ...

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. The ...

We know that Darwinian evolution acts on all forms of life, but does evolution act on non-living materials as well? Otto and his team used a system of three different self-replicating molecules, that, ...

Around 540 million years ago, the biological landscape of Earth went through a huge transformation called the Cambrian ...

Evolution is perhaps the most extraordinary story ever told—a tale spanning billions of years that connects every living thing on Earth through an intricate web of shared ancestry. From the tiniest ...

Bacteria are the most diverse organisms on Earth, with a number of species that’s difficult to quantify. They’re also incredibly old. Bacteria consist of a single cell. They do not have bones and are ...

Researchers have identified microstructures in fossil cells that are 1.75 billion years old. These structures, called thylakoid membranes, are the oldest ever discovered. They push back the fossil ...