The earliest forms of animal life on our planet continue to fascinate scientists, who are seeking to unravel the mystery of ...

Controversial evidence hints that complex life might have emerged hundreds of millions of years earlier than previously ...

MIT geochemists offer compelling evidence that ancient sea sponges were Earth's first animals, emerging over 541 million years ago. By analysing chemical fossils in rocks, researchers identified ...

From a distance, Biosphere 2 emerges from the cacti and creosote of the Sonoran desert like a gleaming oasis, a colony of glass and bright white structures. Despite being just outside Tucson, Arizona, ...

Scientists have uncovered an unexpected witness to Earth’s distant past: tiny iron oxide stones called ooids. These mineral snowballs lock away traces of ancient carbon, revealing that oceans between ...

ETH researchers have refuted the assumption that a huge store of dissolved organic carbon in the ocean was partly responsible for the ice ages and the emergence of complex life between 1,000 and 541 ...

Cross-section of an egg-shaped iron oxide stone: It holds information about the amount of organic carbon in the sea millions of years ago, much like a time capsule. Earth scientists often face huge ...

Researchers at University of Tsukuba have identified key characteristics underlying the high enzyme production capacity of the koji fungus Aspergillus oryzae.

The single-celled organisms that lived during this time grew in thick mats that often accreted into living boulders, called stromatolites, but they were hindered by a limited supply of building ...

The Department of Biological Sciences treats the life sciences in all their breadth and diversity, including the study of molecules, cells, whole organisms, ecosystems, plants, animals and ...