Fossils discovered on Barro Colorado Island suggest central Panama was once home to a vast mangrove forest that was preserved when a volcanic mudflow buried it 23 million years ago.

Last spring, scientists retrieved a trove of mantle rocks from underneath the Atlantic seafloor — a bounty that could help write the first chapter of life’s story on Earth.

Mass extinctions are rapid global decreases in Earth's biodiversity, with five key events identified over the planet's history, arguably the most famous of which occurred ~66 million years ago during the Cretaceous, which brought the rein of dinosaurs to an end. However, the largest mass extinction is attributed to the Permian, during which it is estimated that >95% of all life on Earth was eradicated.

A fossilized plant in a museum collection contained the oldest known disease-causing fungus, with microscopic images showing it bursting through the plant's wall.

Diverse and full of sea life, the Earth's Devonian era—taking place more than 370 million years ago—saw the emergence of the first seed-bearing plants, which spread as large forests across the continents of Gondwana and Laurussia.

The Second Plague Pandemic of the mid-14th century, also known as the Black Death, killed 30% to 60% of the European population and profoundly changed the course of European history. A new study led by researchers from Penn State and the University of Adelaide suggests that this plague, potentially through resulting changes in diet and hygiene, may also be associated with a shift in the composition of the human oral microbiome toward one that contributes to chronic diseases in modern-day humans.

An international team of researchers led by botanists at the University of Vienna, Austria, has analyzed the morphological diversity of fossilized flowers and compared it with the diversity of living species. They found that flowering plants had already produced a large number of different flower types shortly after their emergence in the Cretaceous period, and this earliest floral diversity was greater than that today.

LUCA, the 'last universal common ancestor' of all living organisms, lived 4.32 to at most 4.52 billion years ago. What LUCA looked like is unknown, but it must have been a cell with among others ribosomal proteins and an ATP synthase.