About 700 million years ago, enormous glaciers flowed across the Earth's surface in powerful frozen rivers like "giant ice bulldozers" that pulverized our planet's crust and may have contributed to ...

How did life begin on Earth? While scientists have theories, they don't yet fully understand the precise chemical steps that ...

Life on Earth might not be as Earthly as we think. A recent research published in The Conversation explores a revived and ...

Between a rock and a green place: Michelle Gehringer studies fossilized life on early Earth to learn more about the evolution of (oxygenic) photosynthesis - the process that makes the oxygen we breath ...

Introduction : The coherence of history / Stephen Jay Gould -- The planetary setting of prebiotic evolution / Sherwood Chang -- Early environments : constraints and opportunities for early evolution / ...

People have long wondered what life was first like on Earth, and if there is life in our solar system beyond our planet. Scientists have reason to believe that some of the moons in our solar system – ...

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 ...

Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, possesses a thick, nitrogen-rich atmosphere that bears striking similarities to that of early Earth. Scientists are fascinated by Titan’s atmospheric composition and its ...

Over 500 million years ago, during the Cambrian period, all major animal phyla appeared rapidly in what is known as the Cambrian explosion, which established a completely new Earth-life system. This ...

A recent study investigates how polyester microdroplets, potential precursors to modern cells, could form under realistic early Earth conditions. Researchers pushed these conditions to the limits, ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. We’ve pieced together a remarkably detailed timeline of ...