Origin of Life News

September 9, 2016

World's Oldest Fossils: 3.7 Billion Years Old

How Vertebrate Body Comes from a Single Cell

Plant Roots Built Beachhead for Life On Land

Looking to Saliva to Gain Insight On Evolution

Latest Headlines

updated 1:01am EDT

New Species of Pterosaur Discovered in Patagonia

Aug. 30, 2016 — Scientists today announced the discovery of a new species of pterosaur from the Patagonia region of South America. The cranial remains were in an excellent state of preservation and belonged to a new ... read more

'Cyclops' Beetles Hint at Solution to 'Chicken-and-Egg' Problem in Novel Trait Evolution

Aug. 22, 2016 — Beetles with cyclops eyes have given scientists insight into how new traits may evolve through the recruitment of existing ... read more

Ancient Air Pockets Changing the History of Earth’s Oxygen

Aug. 22, 2016 — Geologists are using new direct methods to measure the Earth's oxygenation. They identified, for the first time, exactly how much oxygen was in Earth's atmosphere 813 million ... read more

Recent Connection Between North and South America Reaffirmed

Aug. 17, 2016 — Long ago, one great ocean flowed between North and South America. When the Isthmus of Panama joined the continents, it also separated the Atlantic from the Pacific Ocean. If ... read more

Tree-Rings Reveal Secret Clocks That Could Reset Key Dates Across the Ancient World

Aug. 17, 2016 — In a new paper, the authors explain how harvesting data from tree-rings could revolutionize the study of ancient ... read more

Humble Moss Helped Create Our Oxygen-Rich Atmosphere

Aug. 15, 2016 — The evolution of the first land plants including mosses may explain a long-standing mystery of how Earth's atmosphere became enriched with oxygen, according to an ... read more

Scientists Take Big Step Toward Recreating Primordial 'RNA World' of 4 Billion Years Ago

Aug. 15, 2016 — Scientists have succeeded in creating a ribozyme that can basically serve both to amplify genetic information and generate ... read more

Twenty-Five Little Bones Tell a Puzzling Story About Early Primate Evolution

Aug. 15, 2016 — A cache of exquisitely preserved bones, found in a coal mine in the state of Gujarat, India, appear to be the most primitive ... read more

Schizophrenia Emerged After Humans Diverged from Neanderthals

Aug. 15, 2016 — Schizophrenia poses an evolutionary enigma. The disorder has existed throughout recorded human history and persists despite its severe effects on thought and behavior, and ... read more

Tracing the Evolution of Bird Reproduction

Aug. 10, 2016 — What really came first -- the chicken or the egg? Birds' reproductive biology is dramatically different from that of any other living vertebrates, and scientists have long ... read more

Israel Divers Find Ancient Marine Cargo in Mediterranean

It's Surprisingly Easy To Brew The Building Blocks Of Life In A Puddle

DNA Data Storage Could Last Thousands of Years

What the New Dinosaur Reveals About the T. Rex

Deer Evolution: Ancient DNA Reveals Novel Relationships

Aug. 9, 2016 — Researchers have sequenced mitochondrial DNA from museum specimens of rare species of deer. Analysis of partial nucleotide sequences has enabled the team to refine our picture of the evolutionary ... read more

Whales' Ultrasonic Hearing Has Surprisingly Ancient History, Fossilized Ear Shows

Aug. 4, 2016 — All living toothed whales rely upon echoes of their own calls to navigate and hunt underwater, a skill that works best in conjunction with high-frequency hearing. Now, researchers who studied one of ... read more

Stone Age Hunter-Gatherers Experimented With Farming in Turkey Before Migrating to Europe

Aug. 4, 2016 — Clusters of hunter-gatherers spent much of the late Stone Age working out the basics of farming on the fertile lands of Turkey before taking this knowledge to Europe. In an analysis of ancient ... read more

New Light Shed on How Vertebrates See: Details in Eyes of 300-Million-Year-Old Lamprey and Hagfish Fossils

Aug. 2, 2016 — New research has overturned a long-standing theory on how vertebrates evolved their eyes by identifying remarkable details of the retina in the eyes of 300 million year-old lamprey and hagfish ... read more

'Red Gene' in Birds, Turtles Suggests Dinosaurs Had Bird-Like Color Vision

Aug. 2, 2016 — A gene for red colour vision that originated in the reptile lineage around 250 million years ago has resulted in the bright red bird feathers and 'painted' turtles we see today, and may be ... read more

New Fossil Evidence Supports Theory That First Mass Extinction Engineered by Early Animals

July 29, 2016 — Newly discovered fossil evidence from Namibia strengthens the proposition that the world's first mass extinction was caused by 'ecosystem engineers' -- newly evolved biological ... read more

New Zealand Wren DNA Analysis Reshapes Geological Theory

July 27, 2016 — A DNA analysis of living and extinct species of mysterious New Zealand wrens may change theories around the country's geological and evolutionary ... read more

Before Animals, Evolution Waited Eons to Inhale

July 25, 2016 — Time to smash the beaker when thinking about oxygen concentrations in water, at the time when animal life first evolved. Oceans stacked oxygen here and depleted it there, as a new novel model ... read more

DNA Analyses Reveal Genetic Identities of World's First Farmers

July 25, 2016 — Conducting the first large-scale, genome-wide analyses of ancient human remains from the Near East, an international team of scientists has illuminated the genetic identities and population dynamics ... read more

Biologists Home in on Paleo Gut for Clues to Our Evolutionary History

July 21, 2016 — A new study of the gut microbiomes of humans, chimps, bonobos and gorillas shows that at least two major groups of bacteria have cospeciated with these hosts, with a lineage going back at least 15 ... read more

GAGA May Be the Secret of the Sexes, at Least in Insects

July 14, 2016 — Without simple repeating sequences of the DNA 'letters' GA on the X chromosome, distinct genders could never have evolved, at least in flies and mosquitoes, report ... read more

Prehistoric Genomes from the World's First Farmers in the Zagros Mountains Reveal Different Neolithic Ancestry for Europeans and South Asians

July 14, 2016 — Populations in the ancient Fertile Crescent are the ancestors of modern day South Asians but not of Europeans, new research shows. The earliest farmers from the Zagros mountains in Iran, i.e., the ... read more