No, oxygen didn't catalyze the swift blossoming of Earth's first multicellular organisms. The result defies a 70-year-old assumption about what caused an explosion of oceanic fauna hundreds of ...

Hundreds of millions of years before dinosaurs, the tallest things on land were not trees or animals but towering, trunk-like ...

Over 150 years ago, a fossilized organism known as Prototaxites emerged as an enigma regarding what early land life may have been like. As an organism that appeared to grow up through Earth’s crust in ...

For a billion years, single-celled eukaryotes ruled the planet. Then around 700 million years ago during Snowball Earth — a geologic era when glaciers may have stretched as far as the Equator — a new ...

In 2017, researchers discovered Chromosphaera perkinsii, a single-celled organism, in marine sediments in Hawaii. According to scientists from the University of Geneva, this organism can form ...

In fact, why and how multicellular life evolved has long puzzled biologists. The first known instance of multicellularity was about 2.5 billion years ago, when marine cells (cyanobacteria) hooked up ...

Researchers funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) at the University of Oxford have uncovered a clue that may help to explain why the earliest evidence of complex ...

The diversity of unicellular eukaryotes covered in the study, with their nucleus (blue) and microtubule cytoskeleton (magenta) stained. These organisms are so distantly related to each other as they ...