Researchers investigating the origin of complex life on Earth might have just made a major breakthrough. The origin of ...

Why do you have five fingers? Why not ten, or twenty, or one? Why do so many animals have five fingers? Five seems to be the perfect number for most hands. Oddly, the first vertebrates to come onto ...

Life on Earth began in a way that still boggles the mind. Around 4.5 billion years ago, a chemical process called abiogenesis ...

Chris Impey receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. We have only one example of biology forming in the universe – life on Earth. But what if life ...

A study presents a striking example of cooperative organization among cells as a potential force in the evolution of multicellular life. The study is based on the fluid dynamics of cooperative feeding ...

Fossilized skeletons and shells clearly show how evolution and extinction unfolded over the past half a billion years, but a new analysis extends the chart of life to nearly 2 billion years ago. The ...

Explore an interactive avian tree of life that reveals how 11,000 bird species are connected through millions of years of ...

The origin of organisms with complex cells, known as eukaryotes, is one of the most crucial parts of life’s evolutionary story. All animals, plants, and fungi are eukaryotes, and if complex cells had ...

As Earth formed, new geologic processes, especially those related to the interaction of hot fluids with rock during igneous activity and plate tectonics, gave birth to over 1500 new mineral species (4 ...

Ben Woodcroft receives funding from the ARC. Adrián A. Davín does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has ...