For decades, geologists labeled a billion-year stretch of Earth’s history—from 1.8 to 0.8 billion years ago—as the “Boring ...

The Grand Canyon is a gigantic geological library, with rocky layers that tell much of the story of Earth’s history.

Ancient rocks reveal a potassium-40 deficit, the first physical evidence of the proto-Earth and insights into early planetary ...

Long before life thrived in Earth’s oceans, the planet’s magnetic field became disorganized. Deep within the ancient rocks of Morocco, scientists have recovered one of the clearest records of that ...

Human evolution is a story writ slow. It’s been about 3.8 billion years since life on Earth emerged and steadily began to ...

A thin slice of the ancient rocks collected from Gakkel Ridge near the North Pole, photographed under a microscope and seen under cross-polarized light. Field width ~ 14mm. Credit: E. Cottrell, ...

Ben Woodcroft receives funding from the ARC. Adrián A. Davín does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has ...

To better understand the circadian clock in modern-day cyanobacteria, a research team has studied ancient timekeeping systems. They examined the oscillation of the clock proteins KaiA, KaiB, and KaiC ...

Our species likes it cold. Homo sapiens evolved in — and still inhabits — one of Earth’s rare and fragile ice ages, periods distinguished not by an abundance of saber-toothed cats and woolly mammoths ...