All life on Earth can be traced back to a Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA. A study suggests that this organism likely lived on Earth only 400 million years after its formation. Further ...

A 410-million-year-old fossil shows ancient lichens were shaping Earth’s surface long before forests took root.

In a peer-reviewed analysis, scientists quantify amino acids before and after our “ last universal common ancestor .” The ...

The question of when life began on Earth is as old as human culture. “It’s one of these fundamental human questions: When did life appear on Earth?” said Professor Martin Whitehouse of the Swedish ...

Earth has a long and dramatic history, and one recurring theme is extinction. Did you know that over the last 500 million years, our planet experienced five major mass extinction events? These events ...

Human evolution is a story writ slow. It’s been about 3.8 billion years since life on Earth emerged and steadily began to ...

The term “ecosystem engineering” has been used for decades as a way to describe organisms that drastically alter their ...

Carbon sustains life—but excess emissions are driving climate change. WWF is working to restore balance and protect our ...

AFTER THE second world war, Leo Szilard, a pioneering nuclear physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, decided to move into biology instead: life; not death. But there was a problem. As a ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: All life on Earth can be traced back to a Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA. A study suggests that this organism likely lived on Earth only 400 ...