Around 1.7 billion years ago, eukaryotes—the building blocks of complex life—first appeared on Earth, and now scientists have ...

A team led by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin has produced what may be the strongest evidence yet that the ...

For decades, scientists have believed that complex life began when two very different microbes joined forces, eventually ...

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 ...

Scientists propose that eukaryotes formed when an Asgard archaeon entered into a close partnership with an alphaproteobacterium. Over time, the two organisms became permanently linked. The ...

Learn how oxygen’s early rise could have given complex life the energy boost it needed to evolve.

For a long time, the origin of complex life has seemed like a chapter torn out of the book of biology. The middle has been ...