This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American Bacterial cells are fundamentally different ...

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Prokaryotic single-celled organisms, the ancestors of modern-day bacteria and archaea, are the most ancient form of life on our planet, first appearing roughly 3.5 billion years ago. The first ...

In a study published in Science Advances on Jan. 24, researchers led by Prof. ZHU Maoyan from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences reported their ...

What is the last common ancestor of all plants and animals? Where did complex life come from and when? Scientists have been trying to answer these questions for many years. A new finding has changed ...

All modern organisms fall into two classes, eukaryotes and prokaryotes. Eukaryotes (from the Greek meaning “true kernel”) have a cell nucleus that harbours most of the cell’s genetic information and ...

Long before plants and animals existed, Earth was dominated by microscopic organisms called prokaryotes. They lived simple, single-celled lives, soaking up nutrients in the oceans billions of years ...

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 ...

A group of researchers led by Shixing Zhu claims to have found complex life in 1.5 billion-year-old rocks in north China. But their paper, published in Nature Communications, instantly provoked ...