Advanced tools and expanded fossil datasets have painted a clearer picture of the eukaryotic diversity of the Proterozoic eon, which has been hard to quantify. The findings show that Earth's severe ...

The Proterozoic is a Precambrian eon of geologic time extending from about 2.5 billion to 541 million years ago, bounded by the Archean–Proterozoic and Proterozoic–Phanerozoic transitions. It is ...

We're inching closer and closer to reliably detecting biosignatures on distant planets. Much of the focus is on determining which chemicals indicate life's presence. But life can also create free ...

Fossilized skeletons and shells clearly show how evolution and extinction unfolded over the past half a billion years, but a new analysis extends the chart of life to nearly 2 billion years ago. The ...

Nitrogen is vital for all forms of life­: It is part of proteins, nucleic acids and other cell structures. Thus, it was of great importance for the development of life on early Earth to be able to ...

Introduction : The coherence of history / Stephen Jay Gould -- The planetary setting of prebiotic evolution / Sherwood Chang -- Early environments : constraints and opportunities for early evolution / ...

All of the amazing riches of biodiversity we see around us exists in just a thin band of life on the surface of this planet. Estimates claim that between a third and half of all the biomass on Earth ...

"Based on a symposium entitled 'Proterozoic crustal dynamics and lithospheric evolution' that was held during the special session on the International Lithosphere Programme at the 27th International ...

It was long assumed that cyanobacteria were mainly responsible for fixing nitrogen on early Earth, thus making nitrogen available to the biosphere. Researchers now show that purple sulfur bacteria ...