Advanced tools and expanded fossil datasets have painted a clearer picture of the eukaryotic diversity of the Proterozoic eon, which has been hard to quantify. The findings show that Earth's severe ...

A study suggests that around 1 billion years ago, photosynthetic primary producers were likely too small to support the development of animal ecosystems. Approximately between 1.8 and 0.8 billion ...

Magma becomes lava when it rises up to the Earth’s surface, like when the Nyiragongo volcano erupted in the Democratic Republic Congo in 2020. Igneous rocks are formed when magma and lava solidify.

Information-molecule loss from centriole-kinetosomes (such as gene loss in plastids and mitochondria) occurred in the sulphurous Proterozoic eon (2500–541 million years ago 17) during which time ...

Microfossils were detected in cherts from six of sixteen localities in the ca. 1,200 million-year-old Dismal Lakes Group, and they are well preserved at three of these localities. The assemblages ...

Proterozoic strata host evidence of global "Snowball Earth" glaciations, large perturbations to the carbon cycle, proposed changes in the redox state of oceans, the diversification of microscopic ...

Laughing gas and the mystery of Carl Sagan's Faint Young Sun Paradox: When the sun shone dimmer an eon ago, Earth remained warm in spite of it likely thanks to a mix of greenhouse gases.

It was long assumed that cyanobacteria were mainly responsible for fixing nitrogen on early Earth, thus making nitrogen available to the biosphere. Researchers now show that purple sulfur bacteria ...

A couple of times in four billion years, evolution has slowed to a crawl. And an eon or so has passed before more complex life forms, such as simple animals, could arise. Evolution may have been ...

Some rocks below the Great Unconformity are 1.2 billion years older than those above it. In some places, the rocks below the Great Unconformity are about 1.2 billion years older than those above it.

(CN) — More than a billion years ago, tectonic activity on Earth may have stopped so completely that no new mountains could be formed on the planet for an entire eon — putting evolution of life on ...