Microfossils may capture a jump in the complexity of life that coincided with the rise of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere and oceans, according to an international team of scientists.

Sometimes microfossils are preserved as hair-like tubular filaments of organic carbon. Sometimes the organic carbon has long since disappeared and a microorganism-shaped hole in the rock is all ...

810 Million-Year-Old Microfossils Are Ancient Example of Mineralized Tissue (3 of 8) ...

"We worked on a hunch that these microfossils could be cysts of euglenoids, but no one had ever seen a euglenoid make a cyst in nature or in a lab," van de Schootbrugge said. Dating back 400 ...

Microfossils up to almost 4.3 billion years old found in Canada of microbes are similar to the bacteria that thrive today around sea floor hydrothermal vents and may represent the oldest-known ...

Fast-forward 70 years, and new microfossils have pushed that timeline well into the Archean Eon. Most assume that the first cells were likely simpler than the 1 to 2 micrometer-wide bacteria we ...

New analysis shows that the microfossils are indeed biological, and the find may have implications for the likelihood of extraterrestrial life. The title of Oldest Fossil is a controversial one.

That makes these new microfossils a startling 4.2 billion years old, if proven correct. The discovery that the oldest life on Earth may have formed so early is exciting for a number of reasons.

(CN) — Scientists have discovered the oldest evidence of photosynthetic structures inside 1.75 billion-year-old microfossils, found in rock samples in Australia. "With this discovery, we can identify ...

Damaged microfossils have been observed at other impact sites, but Edwards says that scientists had attributed the microscopic carnage to poor preservation, not the impacts.