The early years of Earth are a murky mess, so we don't really know how or when life first arose. With each new fossil discovery, the timeline for life is pushed back earlier and earlier, but the ...

Earth's oldest fossils may be billions of years old—although such claims are highly controversial. These kinds of discoveries usually start with finding what appear to be preserved outlines of ...

Scientists have long pondered how and when the evolution of prokaryotes to eukaryotes occurred. A collaborative research team from Tohoku University and the University of Tokyo may have provided some ...

Petrified Forest National Park in northern Arizona is famous for enormous crystalized trees and dinosaur bones dating back to the Triassic period. The park's hills are also full of tiny bones.

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– New fossil findings discovered by scientists at UC Santa Barbara challenge prevailing views about the effects of "Snowball Earth" glaciations on life, according to an ...

Microfossils may capture a jump in the complexity of life that coincided with the rise of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere and oceans, according to an international team of scientists. Microfossils from ...

NASA's Mars 2020 rover will store rock and soil samples in sealed tubes on the planet's surface for future missions to retrieve, as seen in this illustration Using a revolutionary new imaging process, ...

Light microscope images of euglenoid cysts from the Triassic-Jurassic boundary (approx. 200 million years old) in the Schandelah-1 core in Germany (left) and from Triassic sediments in Winterswijk, ...

Scientists have confirmed that the 3.4-billion-year-old Strelley Pool microfossils had chemical characteristics similar to modern bacteria. This all but confirms their biological origin and ranks them ...

Scientists studying rocks extracted from sediments deep beneath eastern Virginia say they may have found a new way to identify the locations of ancient, hidden craters blasted by extraterrestrial ...

Images of the newly discovered microfossil from the 1.9-billion-year-old Gunflint Formation. Scientists have long pondered how and when the evolution of prokaryotes to eukaryotes occurred. In contrast ...

Alexander Brasier does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond ...