Tiny relatives of our cellular ancestors reshape long protrusions within minutes and pull themselves across surfaces using ancient actin machinery.

Asgard archaea, our closest known microbial relatives, play a key role in current models of the origin of more complex ...

More than 12,000 microscopic fossils recovered from 1.7-billion-year-old rocks in northern Australia are offering scientists ...

Prokaryotic single-celled organisms, the ancestors of modern-day bacteria and archaea, are the most ancient form of life on our planet, first appearing roughly 3.5 billion years ago. The first ...

Long before animals or plants existed in Earth's oceans, a sea that is hard to imagine today stretched across northern ...

Scientists studying ancient Australian rocks uncovered more than 12,000 fossils from some of the oldest known eukaryotes on Earth. These early complex cells lived in settings ranging from coastal ...

For billions of years after the origin of life, the only living things on Earth were tiny, primitive cells resembling today’s bacteria. But then, more than 1.5 billion years ago, something remarkable ...

The sun has just set on a quiet mudflat in Australia's Northern Territory; it'll set again in another 19 hours. A young moon looms large over the desolate landscape. No animals scurry in the waning ...

In the beginning, there was boredom. Following the emergence of cellular life on earth, some 3.5 billion years ago, simple cells lacking a nucleus and other detailed internal structure dominated the ...

Scientists have discovered the remains of a “lost world” of mysterious lifeforms that thrived on Earth some 1.6 billion years ago and may be the oldest known ancestors of the lineage that eventually ...