Earth news stories

According to a recent study, the amazing survival techniques of polar marine creatures may help to explain how the earliest animals on Earth may have evolved earlier than the oldest fossils suggest

Physicists have long struggled to explain why the Universe started out with conditions suitable for life to evolve. Why do the physical laws and constants take the very specific values that allow stars, planets, and ultimately life to develop?

Tardigrades are tiny, incredibly tough animals that can withstand a wide range of dangers, including many that would obliterate most other creatures known to science.

Experts have voted for an expansion of the universe – or at least the official terminology that can be drawn upon to describe the vanishingly small and the preposterously large.

4.6bn-year-old rock that crashed on to a driveway in Gloucestershire last year has provided some of the most compelling evidence to date that water arrived on Earth from asteroids in the outer solar system.

A global drop in oxygen levels about 550 million years ago led to Earth’s first known mass extinction, new evidence suggests.

Tracking down the oldest traces of life on Earth isn’t easy. Smoosh a bunch of microbes between layers of rock and let them ripen for billions of years; what you end up with is going to resemble rock more than an ancient life form.

Before life on Earth exploded in diversity some 540 million years ago, the first primitive animal skeletons were already starting to form.

A river longer than England’s Thames flows beneath the Antarctic ice sheet, draining an area the size of France and Germany combined, new research reveals.

A snail preserved in amber with an intact fringe of tiny delicate bristles along its shell is helping biologists better understand why one of the world’s slimiest animals might evolve such a groovin’ hairstyle.

Researchers measured the electrical fields near swarming honeybees and discovered that insects can produce as much atmospheric electric charge as a thunderstorm cloud.

Ancient creatures are emerging from the cold storage of melting permafrost, almost like something out of a horror movie.

It is no surprise that a 14km-wide asteroid slamming into the Gulf of Mexico would generate one hell of a tsunami, but this is the first time anyone has worked out how big and how far-reaching it would have been.

The history of Earth’s bombardment with cosmic radiation is written in the trees.

Leaders of the Native American Church of North America (NACNA) held multiple meetings with congressional offices last month to advocate that federal funding be dedicated toward efforts to preserve habitats where peyote can be grown.

Strange libraries of supplementary genes nicknamed “Borg” DNA appear to supercharge the microbes that possess them, giving them an uncanny ability to metabolize materials in their environment faster than their competitors