Understanding microbial communities can give clues to how life shaped the Earth billions of years ago – and help find signs of life on distant planets. Life has shaped the chemical and geological ...

More daylight helped oxygen escape from microbial mats. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Here's a new spin on how Earth became an ...

After sustaining seemingly catastrophic hurricane damage, a primordial groundcover vital to sustaining a multitude of coastal lifeforms bounced back to life in a matter of months. The finding, co-led ...

A future astronaut traipsing across the landing sites of the Mars Exploration Rovers — Spirit and Opportunity — might be squishing into a welcome mat of microbes, according to one NASA scientist.

These were commonly so abundant that microbial mats basically covered much of the Earth’s ocean seafloors. Then during the Cambrian, a little more than a half billion years ago, animals evolved and ...

Introduction. Microbial mats, stromatolites and MISS : an overview -- The geobiological concept -- Microbially induced sedimentary structures (The scholarly definition ; Taxonomic relation of MISS to ...

Despite bearing witness to its own increase in Earth's atmosphere by around 2.5 to 2.3 billion years ago, oxygen has had relatively little to say about its own early history until now. A recent ...

Brendan Paul Burns and Kimberley L. Gallagher do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no ...

Hidden nearly 2,300 feet beneath the Atlantic Ocean, scientists have uncovered an ancient and active undersea landscape that may hold clues to life’s earliest beginnings — and even the potential for ...