A missing piece of Earth's evolutionary timeline may have been found. Using computational modeling, a team of scientists explored how working backwards from modern biochemistry could help map out how ...

New research shows that the earliest sponges were soft bodied and lacked skeletons, explaining why their oldest fossils are ...

Sponges may be ancient, but their timeline has been murky. New research suggests the earliest sponges were soft and ...

Dominican amber preserves a 16-million-year-old ant queen, marking the first fossil evidence of Hypoponera in the Americas.

New evidence from rocks, molecules and machine learning is forcing scientists to redraw the opening chapters of Earth’s story, pushing the first stirrings of biology far closer to the planet’s violent ...

Bacteria, among the oldest of life forms, have lived in seemingly every possible habitat on the planet, from ocean trenches and mountaintops to hot springs and polar ice. Yet, they have left a limited ...

Scientists have helped to construct a detailed timeline for bacterial evolution, suggesting some bacteria used oxygen long before evolving the ability to produce it through photosynthesis. University ...