Proterozoic rivers flowed through barren landscapes, and lacked interactions with macroscopic organisms. It is widely held that, in the absence of vegetation, fluvial systems featured barely ...

Most modern marine ecology is ultimately based on unicellular phytoplankton, yet most large animals are unable to graze directly on even relatively large net phytoplankton; the repackaging effected by ...

The partial pressure of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere has increased dramatically through time, and this increase is thought to have occurred in two rapid steps at both ends of the Proterozoic Eon (~2.5 ...

Advanced tools and expanded fossil datasets have painted a clearer picture of the eukaryotic diversity of the Proterozoic eon, which has been hard to quantify. The findings show that Earth's severe ...

The Proterozoic Eon, spanning from 2,500 million to 539 million years ago, marked a transformative chapter in Earth's history. Often overshadowed by the more data-rich Phanerozoic Eon, this period was ...

During the Proterozoic era, oxygen produced by photosynthesizing bacteria collects in the oceans and then in the atmosphere. Iron present in exposed rocks reacts with this oxygen, and rust colors the ...

Archaean and early Proterozoic rocks reveal that the Earth's magnetic field two billion years ago behaved differently than over most of the past 200 million years. Do these changes relate to the ...

A new study led by researchers at Yale and McGill University reveals how fluctuations in the Earth’s oxygen levels over 700 million years ago may have set the stage for the diversification of ...