For billions of years after the origin of life, the only living things on Earth were tiny, primitive cells resembling today’s bacteria. But then, more than 1.5 billion years ago, something remarkable ...

The most widely accepted scientific explanation for the arrival of all complex life on Earth has had an unsolved mystery at its heart. According to the theory, all plants, animals and fungi, known ...

All complex life, a.k.a. eukaryotes, trace their roots to a common Asgard archaean ancestor. According to this latest study, all complex life forms (a.k.a. eukaryotes) trace their roots back to a ...

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 ...

Editor’s Note: Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. Plants, algae, fungi, and animals — ...

In a study published in Science Advances on Jan. 24, researchers led by Prof. ZHU Maoyan from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences reported their ...

Since the bacterial-origin CRISPR-Cas system rose to popularity as a genome editing tool, scientists have wondered whether other genome editors exist in nature. Now, two independent research teams ...