Every organism alive on Earth, from oak trees to octopuses to the bacteria in our gut, belongs to a single extended family. Genetic evidence points back to one ancestral cell, a last common forebear ...

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 ...

A 518-million-year-old ambulacrarian fossil from China suggests that the common ancestor of starfish and their relatives was ...

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 ...

Tuna, salmon, mackerel. I’ve never looked at my afternoon sushi and wondered if it’s related to humans. So, I asked one of those friends named Thomas Siek. He’s a biological anthropologist at ...