A couple of times in four billion years, evolution has slowed to a crawl. And an eon or so has passed before more complex life forms, such as simple animals, could arise. Evolution may have been ...

A study suggests that around 1 billion years ago, photosynthetic primary producers were likely too small to support the development of animal ecosystems. Approximately between 1.8 and 0.8 billion ...

The Proterozoic eon witnessed transformative shifts in Earth’s geochemical cycles, driven by evolving tectonic regimes, redox conditions and mantle processes. The assembly and dispersal of ...

Research reveals when and why ancient tropical seas transitioned from oxygen oases to marine dead zones, providing clues to the long-term evolution of oceanic environments. The tropical oceans that ...

Advanced tools and expanded fossil datasets have painted a clearer picture of the eukaryotic diversity of the Proterozoic eon, which has been hard to quantify. The findings show that Earth's severe ...

Ancient species may have evolved more slowly and lasted longer, but the pace of evolution picked up after global ice ages, according to a new study from Virginia Tech. Published in the journal Science ...

For a stretch of time that had widely been thought of as an evolutionary non-event, it was always going to be a tough ask to compete with the relative glamour of what came next — the Cambrian period, ...

A couple of times in four billion years, evolution has slowed to a crawl. And an eon or so has passed before more complex life forms, such as simple animals, could arise. Evolution may have been ...

Time to smash the beaker when thinking about oxygen concentrations in water, at the time when animal life first evolved. Oceans stacked oxygen here and depleted it there, as a new novel model ...