In the oceans and on land, scientists are discovering rare, transitional organisms that bridge the gap between Earth’s simplest cells and today’s complex ones.

All complex life forms on Earth, including plants and animals, are made up of eukaryotic cells; they are more sophisticated than bacterial or archaeal cells, which are prokaryotic. Eukaryotes have ...

A bizarre bacteria has been discovered with an ability previously thought impossible for its kind. This strange discovery could shine a light on how some of our earliest single-celled ancestors formed ...

Researchers investigating the origin of complex life on Earth appear to have solved a longstanding mystery at the heart of how animals, plants, and fungi evolved. To understand the conundrum, you must ...

Imagine being one cartwheel away from changing your appearance. One flip, and your brunette locks are platinum blond. That's not too far from what happens in some prokaryotes, or single-cell organisms ...

In the beginning, there was boredom. Following the emergence of cellular life on earth, some 3.5 billion years ago, simple cells lacking a nucleus and other detailed internal structure dominated the ...

Scientists generally agree that eukaryotes, the domain of life whose cells contain nuclei and that includes almost all multicellular organisms, originated from a process involving the symbiotic union ...

Let’s say you’ve discovered a new bacterium or archaea and want to give it a name so that it can be classified and placed on the appropriate branch of the tree of life. According to the International ...

A new study challenges a popular scenario put forward to explain the arrival of the first eukaryotic organisms. In the beginning, there was boredom. Following the emergence of cellular life on earth, ...