Scientists have debated where Prototaxites belong in the tree of life for over a century, but new a new study suggests it ...

An ancient and enormous organism called Prototaxites, initially found to be a type of fungus, may actually be an unknown ...

New research sheds light on one of the biggest questions in biology: where did complex life come from? The answer may lie ...

ETH researchers discovered related structures in Asgard archaea and describe their structure. These experiments show that ...

Scientists reveal the role of hidden microbes called Asgard archaea in the origins of complex life, challenging long-held ...

Finally, the three-domain structure of Woese's tree (Figure 1a) shows that evolutionary history is decoupled from biological organization. Indeed, archaea and bacteria appear very similar ...

Ten years ago, nobody knew that Asgard archaea even existed. In 2015, however, researchers examining deep-sea sediments discovered gene fragments that indicated a new and previously undiscovered form ...

According to this latest study, all complex life forms (a.k.a. eukaryotes) trace their roots back to a common ancestor among a group of microbes called the Asgard archaea.

Since the late 1980s, all life forms have been split into three groups on the phylogenetic tree of life: bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes. Eukaryotes and archaea have long been considered “sister ...