Fossils of a giant new species –the Tyrannosaurus rex of the Cambrian–a long-extinct group of sea creatures called trilobites have been found on Kangaroo Island, South Australia. Around 540 million years ago, the most important moment in the history of evolution, the Cambrian Explosion, the spectacular supernova of biology, detonated, and the world of animal life—creatures that move around and eat other organisms for a living—was born.
Are Homo sapiens a one-off, genetic accident? Scientists have identified a group of planets outside our solar system where the same chemical conditions that may have led to life on Earth exist in what they call the Abiogenesis Zone. It’s also possible that if there is extraterrestrial life, that it has, or will, develop in a totally different way than it did on Earth.
Scientists have unearthed fossilized fungi in the remote Northwest Territories of the Canadian Arctic dating back to one billion years, in a discovery that could reshape our understanding of how life first arrived on land from the oceans.
Scientists have created a living organism whose DNA is entirely human-made — perhaps a new form of life, experts said, and a milestone in the field of synthetic biology by researchers at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, who reported on Wednesday that they had rewritten the DNA of the bacteria Escherichia coli, producing a synthetic genome four times larger and far more complex than any previously created. (more…)
There have been about 15,000 generation of human beings on our planet, and some 500,000 generations of cockroaches. Now we learn that the inglorious bedbug has been a parasitic companions with other species aside from humans for more than 100 million years, stalking their hosts at the same time as dinosaurs.
As more and more giant viruses have been discovered, scientists have started to wonder whether some genes in living organisms actually came from ancient viruses. “Viruses are not traditionally considered alive,” writes Sarah Zang in The Atlantic, “because they lack the cellular machinery to replicate on their own. But scientists have found giant viruses with genes for building proteins, which are necessary for replication.
