Ancient fossil structures imprinted on rocks that were once deep beneath the ocean suggest the search for the first life on ...

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 ...

Somewhat akin to astronomical dark matter (the unseen stuff thought to make up some 80 percent of all matter in the cosmos), so-called microbiological ‘dark matter’ here on Earth poses almost as much ...

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 ...

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 ...

Smithsonian scientists study saline lakes in the Chilean desert to travel back in time to ancient Earth and beyond Emma Saaty This saline pond system in the Salar de Llamara region of northern Chile’s ...

In a recent paper published in Geology, scientists propose that certain kinds of wrinkle structures in sedimentary rock are the remnants of ancient microbial communites, similar to those found in deep ...

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 ...

Gases rising from deep within the Earth are fueling the world’s highest-known microbial ecosystems, which have been detected near the rim of the 19,850-foot-high Socompa volcano in the Andes by a ...