This post is a bit of an odd one: it's a collection of images of diatom arrangements. Diatoms are single-celled algae that have a glass shell, that refracts light in beautiful colors if viewed under a microscope...

The long read: Without plankton, the modern ocean ecosystem – the very idea of the ocean as we understand it – would collapse. Earth would have no complex life of any kind

Scientists are getting very close to bringing a few iconic species, like woolly mammoths and dodos, back from extinction. That may not be a good thing.

Shortly after an asteroid slammed into Earth 66 million years ago, life for non-avian dinosaurs ended, but the evolutionary story for the early ancestors of birds began.

The trees originated in Madagascar 21 million years ago but later traveled long distances by way of ocean currents, according to new research

The tree fossils dating back 390 million years were found near a Butlin's holiday camp in Somerset.

Researchers have discovered a fossil forest with small, palm-like trees and arthropod tracks dating back to the Middle Devonian.

The visual systems of an obscure group of mollusks provide a rare natural example of path-dependent evolution, in which a critical fork in the creatures’ past determined their evolutionary futures.

Early Earth’s volcanoes could have spurred lightning that transformed atmospheric nitrogen, creating molecules that would have been necessary for life to emerge.

Researchers have successfully created a compound critical for metabolism in all living cells, which is essential for energy production and regulation.

Unearthing The Oldest Forest on Earth Two Hours from New York City You Can Travel Back Nearly 400 Million Years By Gayil Nalls Sign up for our monthly newsletter! The exploration of an ancient, fossilized forest in a quarry in Cairo, New York, in the region of the Catskill-Hudson Valley, initiated y...

Wollemi pines — thought to have gone extinct 2 million years ago — were rediscovered in 1994. Scientists are now hoping to reintroduce the species in the wild in a conservation effort that could take centuries.

In a new study published in New Phytologist, scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, along with partners in Latin America, Asia and Australia, present an updated family tree of orchids, tracing their origins to the northern hemisphere some 85 million years ago. Not only does the study shed new...

Millions of years ago, widespread volcano eruptions in eastern Australia buried entire forests. Today, these time capsules reveal stunningly fossilised plants.

‘The history of life on land consists of plants and animals that are unlike any of those that live at the present’

Pollen can help scientists track changes in vegetation through time, as they respond to moderations of the climate, be that glaciation or deglaciation with transitions into and out of ice ages. Furthermore, it can help elucidate the interplay between climate and the impact early human settlement exp...

West African cuisine has long been known for its distinct ingredients and flavours, often enhanced by the addition of a large and diverse range of plant foods. A traditional meal comprises a starchy staple cooked in a pot and served with a sauce prepared from vegetables, fish and/or meat, often acco...

Researchers uncovered fossils of multicellular eukaryotes that are over a billion years old.

It wasn’t just colonists and convicts who invaded Australia in 1788 – invasive plant species arrived too.

Seagrasses provide the foundation of one of the most highly biodiverse, yet vulnerable, coastal marine ecosystems globally. They arose in three independent lineages from their freshwater ancestors some 100 million years ago and are the only fully submerged, marine flowering plants. Moving to such a ...

If you ever find yourself playing a game of twenty questions, there's a little-known life form you can pick that is sure to leave your opponent stumped.

Amid the discovery of a lost city in the Amazon rainforest, scientists are uncovering a different kind of relic underground – one that's still being used today.

New evidence indicates that Arctic areas with the thickest ice today probably melted out every year during the summer for about 1,600 years during the early Holocene (ca. 11.3-9.7k years ago), maki…

Fossils discovered on Barro Colorado Island suggest central Panama was once home to a vast mangrove forest that was preserved when a volcanic mudflow buried it 23 million years ago.

Last spring, scientists retrieved a trove of mantle rocks from underneath the Atlantic seafloor — a bounty that could help write the first chapter of life’s story on Earth.

Mass extinctions are rapid global decreases in Earth's biodiversity, with five key events identified over the planet's history, arguably the most famous of which occurred ~66 million years ago during the Cretaceous, which brought the rein of dinosaurs to an end. However, the largest mass extinction ...

A fossilized plant in a museum collection contained the oldest known disease-causing fungus, with microscopic images showing it bursting through the plant's wall.

Diverse and full of sea life, the Earth's Devonian era—taking place more than 370 million years ago—saw the emergence of the first seed-bearing plants, which spread as large forests across the continents of Gondwana and Laurussia.

The Second Plague Pandemic of the mid-14th century, also known as the Black Death, killed 30% to 60% of the European population and profoundly changed the course of European history. A new study led by researchers from Penn State and the University of Adelaide suggests that this plague, potentially ...

An international team of researchers led by botanists at the University of Vienna, Austria, has analyzed the morphological diversity of fossilized flowers and compared it with the diversity of living species. They found that flowering plants had already produced a large number of different flower ty...

LUCA, the 'last universal common ancestor' of all living organisms, lived 4.32 to at most 4.52 billion years ago. What LUCA looked like is unknown, but it must have been a cell with among others ribosomal proteins and an ATP synthase.

Movement of rivers, mountains, oceans and sediment nutrients at the geological timescale are the central drivers of Earth's biodiversity, research published in Nature has revealed.