Perhaps the most remarkable feature of all species, living and extinct, is their extraordinary interconnectivity. Each species on Earth can trace its roots back to the same cluster of ancestral ...

Four billion years ago, Earth was violent, hot, and unstable. Yet new research suggests that by then, life had already reached a surprising level of complexity. At that time lived the last universal ...

LUCA, the "last universal common ancestor" of all living organisms, lived 4.32–4.52 billion years ago, according to a study from NIOZ biologists Tara Mahendrarajah and senior author Anja Spang, with ...

A digital representation illustrating how LUCA was already under attack from viruses even at 4.2 billion years ago. An international team of researchers led by the University of Bristol has shed light ...

Why do you have five fingers? Why not ten, or twenty, or one? Why do so many animals have five fingers? Five seems to be the perfect number for most hands. Oddly, the first vertebrates to come onto ...

Every modern mammal, from a platypus to a blue whale, is descended from a common ancestor that lived about 180 million years ago. We don’t know a great deal about this animal, but the organization of ...

More than 1 million years before the early hominin known as Lucy was striding across the Afar region of Ethiopia, the lesser-known Ardipithecus ramidus roamed approximately the same area. Now, a team ...

Roy M. Farman received funding from the Research Training Program through the University of New South Wales. Mike Archer has received funding from the Australian Research Council, the Australian ...