An ancient and enormous organism called Prototaxites, initially found to be a type of fungus, may actually be an unknown ...

According to this latest study, all complex life forms (a.k.a. eukaryotes) trace their roots back to a common ancestor among a group of microbes called the Asgard archaea.

How do scientists study and classify life-forms? How can we understand the complex evolutionary connections between living organisms? Woese's breakthrough was momentous for at least three reasons.

Data generated by genomic sequencing projects from a wide variety of species now allow for the assembly of concatenated or combined protein sequence data sets to reconstruct the universal tree of ...

Current hypotheses suggest that all life on Earth evolved from a common ancestor that diversified into the variety of organisms seen today. Scientists propose that the eukaryotic branch of this family ...

“This is the most exciting and important paper on big questions about eukaryotic origins and the tree of life in years,” said evolutionary biologist Jeffrey Palmer of Indiana University, Bloomington, ...