More than 3.5 billion years ago, the Earth was not the hospitable world we know today. The atmosphere lacked oxygen, the seas ...

Ancient microbial activity preserved in deep seafloor sediments challenges assumptions about where fragile traces of early ...

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 ...

Deep-sea sediment layers show rare microbial wrinkle structures that formed in environments far beyond the reach of sunlight. Dr. Rowan Martindale, a paleoecologist and geobiologist at the University ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

Microorganisms live in biofilms - the equivalent of microbial "cities"- everywhere on Earth. These city-like structures protect and house microbial communities and play essential roles in enabling ...

Fossils called stromatolites from Western Australia were created by microbes 3.48 billion years ago. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it ...