EARLY EARTH

News About The Primordial Earth

1,835 articles

Fossil site reveals giant arthropods dominated the seas 470 million years ago
Dec 14, 2022 (SPX)
Early evidence from the site at Taichoute, once undersea but now a desert, records numerous large "free-swimming" arthropods. More research is needed to analyse...
Remains of two new marine worms from 455 million years ago discovered in Morocco
Dec 13, 2022 (SPX)
Palaeoscolecid worms are not rare in the Paleozoic; the problem is that 99.99% of the fossil record comprises their sclerites (hard plates embedded in the cutic...
Meteorites plus gamma rays could have given Earth the building blocks for life
Dec 08, 2022 (SPX)
Now, researchers reporting in ACS Central Science have experimentally shown that amino acids could have formed in these early meteorites from reactions driven b...
525-million-year-old fossil defies textbook explanation for brain evolution
Nov 25, 2022 (SPX)
"To our knowledge, this is the oldest fossilized brain we know of, so far," Strausfeld said. Cardiodictyon belonged to an extinct group of animals known as armo...
FSU researchers find decrease in crucial trace element preceded ancient mass extinction
Nov 23, 2022 (SPX)
The decrease may have contributed to the mass extinction, in which up to 90% of species in the oceans perished, and it suggests that much more organic carbon wa...
Rapid fluctuations in oxygen levels coincided with Earth's first mass extinction
Nov 18, 2022 (SPX)
About 443 million years ago, life on Earth was undergoing the Late Ordovician mass extinction, or LOME, which eliminated about 85% of marine species. Scientists...
Linking mass extinctions to the expansion and radiation of land plants
Nov 14, 2022 (SPX)
Additionally, it was during the Devonian that trees and complex land plants similar to those we know today first evolved and spread across the landscape. This e...
Evolution of tree roots may have driven mass extinctions
Nov 14, 2022 (SPX)
Evidence for this new view of a remarkably volatile period in Earth's pre-history is reported in the Geological Society of America Bulletin, one of the oldest a...
New light on Earth's first known mass extinction event 550 million years ago
Nov 08, 2022 (SPX)
The research spearheaded by Scott Evans, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Geosciences, part of the Virginia Tech College of Science, shows this ea...
How magnetism could help explain Earth's formation
Nov 03, 2022 (SPX)
Now scientists at the University of Leeds and the University of Chicago have analysed the dynamics of fluids and electrically conducting fluids and concluded th...
500 million year-old fossils reveal answer to evolutionary riddle
Nov 02, 2022 (SPX)
The first animals to build hard and robust skeletons appear suddenly in the fossil record in a geological blink of an eye around 550-520 million years ago durin...
Ostrich-like dinosaurs from Mississippi are among the world's largest at over 800kg
Oct 21, 2022 (SPX)
During the Late Cretaceous Period, North America was split by a seaway into two landmasses: Laramidia to the west and Appalachia to the east. But fossils from A...
Learning about the first animals on Earth from life at the poles
Oct 17, 2022 (SPX)
The fossil record places the earliest animal life on Earth at 572-602 million years ago, just as the world came out of a huge ice age, whilst molecular studies ...
Back to the future of photosynthesis
Oct 17, 2022 (SPX)
Present day life fully depends on photosynthetic organisms like plants and algae that capture and convert CO2. At the heart of these processes lies an enzyme ca...
How fluctuating oxygen levels may have accelerated animal evolution
Oct 17, 2022 (SPX)
Scientists believe atmospheric oxygen developed in three stages, starting with what is known as the Great Oxidation Event around two billion years ago, when oxy...
Fish fossils found in China offer clues on human evolution: researchers
Sep 28, 2022 (AFP)
Two fossil deposits of ancient fish in Guizhou, southern China, and Chongqing in the southwest were discovered by scientists during a field study in 2019. The f...
541-million-year-old 3D fossil algae reveal modern-looking ancestry of the plant kingdom
Sep 22, 2022 (SPX)
Discovered at a site in China, this 541-million-year-old fossil is the first and oldest green alga from this era to be preserved in three dimensions, enabling t...
New Curtin-led research discovers the heart of our evolution
Sep 22, 2022 (SPX)
The new research, published in Science, found that the position of the organs in the body of arthrodires - an extinct class of armoured fishes that flourished t...
What killed dinosaurs and other life on earth?
Sep 13, 2022 (SPX)
The findings provide the most compelling quantitative evidence so far that the link between major volcanic eruptions and wholesale species turnover is not simpl...
Discovery of new types of microfossils may answer an age-old scientific question
Sep 07, 2022 (SPX)
Details of their findings were published in the journal Precambrian Research on August 19, 2022. The Gunflint Formation traverses the northern part of Minnesota...
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