Earth's earliest life left behind very few chemical traces. Fragile remains, like ancient cells and microbial mats, were buried, squeezed, heated, and broken apart by the planet's shifting crust ...

Scientists have uncovered some of the oldest chemical traces of life ever found on Earth using a new analytical method capable of identifying the molecular fingerprints of ancient organisms. The ...

FOR centuries, the archives of the world’s great libraries were treated as silent repositories of ink and paper. Historians read them for their texts but rarely examined them as biological objects.