Oxygen played a key role in the evolution of complex organisms, according to new research published in BMC Evolutionary Biology. The study shows that the complexity of life forms increased earlier ...

Learn how one-celled organisms, or single-celled organisms, helped build complex life.

Researchers have discovered that a single-celled organism, a close relative of animals, harbors the remnants of ancient giant viruses woven into its own genetic code. This finding sheds light on how ...

More than half a billion years ago on a frigid, ice-covered Earth, glaciers stirred up ingredients for complex life by bulldozing land minerals and then depositing them in the ocean, according to a ...

Exceptionally preserved fossils from the Ediacaran period challenge what scientists thought was possible in sandstone. In the fossil record, creatures without hard shells or skeletons, such as ...

Blacksburg, Va. – In 3.5 billion years, life on earth went from single microscopic cells to giant sequoias and blue whales. Scientists have now documented quantitatively that the increase in maximum ...

New work shows that physical folding of the genome to control genes located far away may have been a critical turning point for life on Earth. For evolutionary biologists, what most distinguishes the ...

The Cambrian explosion was an extraordinary phenomenon in the evolution of life on the planet that led to the emergence of many animal phyla and the diversification of species. During this period, ...

The world is full of unusual unicellular organisms and microbes, many of which have not been discovered yet. In 2017, scientists identified a single-celled marine organism called Chromosphaera ...