Today in Science: Complex life may have evolved many times

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October 14, 2025—Life may have originated on Earth differently than scientists thought. Plus, a successful SpaceX launch and corals in mass decline.    —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor TODAY'S NEWS Australia's Great Barrier Reef. David Gray/AFP/Getty Surging temperatures worldwide have pushed coral reef ecosystems into a state of widespread decline, marking the first time the planet has reached a climate "tipping point," researchers announced. | 3 min read  Yesterday SpaceX successfully launched the 11th test flight this year of its Starship megarocket. | 3 min read  A new search engine can quickly sift through the staggering volumes of biological data (like DNA and RNA) housed in public repositories. It's dubbed "Google for DNA." | 3 min read Three economists won the economics Nobel for showing how science fuels growth. | 4 min read  More than 30 percent of this century's science Nobel prizewinners are or were immigrants. | 5 min read More News Support science journalism you can trust with a subscription to Scientific American. Today in Science readers get special deals.  TOP STORIES Chemical analyses of the Francevillian specimens suggest that they are the remains of eukaryotic organisms. Abderrazak El Albani/University of Poitiers Origins of Life In 2008 Abderrazak El Albani, now a professor of geology at the University of Poitiers in France, discovered gleaming bits of pyrite in many bizarre shapes in an exposed scrape of black shale outside the town of Franceville in Gabon. He couldn't explain how such objects existed in a bed of sedimentary rock. Since that first discovery, his team has collected more than 6,000 pieces—all of them from the same site in Gabon. They are, according to El Albani, fossils of complex life-forms—organisms made up of multiple, specialized cells—that lived in colonies long before any such thing is supposed to have existed on Earth.   Why this is interesting: The traditional evolutionary story goes that complex life on Earth originated once, around 1.6 billion years ago. But El Albani's discovery of fossils dating to about 2.14 billion years ago (and other evidence since) goes against that. If the Gabon fossils are of multicellular creatures that old, not only did complex multicellular life appear earlier than previously thought, but it might have done so multiple times, taking hold once, when environmental conditions were conducive.   What they were: These organisms—if that's what they were—were unlike any life form on earth now. El Albani thinks they might belong to a lineage of colonial eukaryotes—perhaps something resembling a slime mold—that independently developed the complex multicellular processes needed to survive at large sizes. These organisms would have been an entirely independent evolution of this form of life. Counterarguments:Prominent researchers argue that El Albani's specimens are actually formations of natural pyrite that only look like fossils. They point to a well-known phenomenon of pyrite "suns" or "flowers," superficially fossil-like accumulations of minerals that occasionally turn up in sediments rich in actual fossils. Others have conjectured that the pyritized specimens are probably just the remains of bacterial mats, not complex life-forms. Rocks from the Francevillian Basin in Gabon are filled with gleaming shapes that have been interpreted as fossils of complex life-forms from more than two billion years ago. Abderrazak El Albani/University of Poitiers

EXPERT PERSPECTIVES The details of how life arose on Earth are still something of a scientific mystery, astrophysicist Mario Livio and professor of chemistry Jack W. Szostak wrote in 2024. "Since we have not yet discovered any life outside of Earth, we have no idea of the probability of life emerging on a planet," they say. "It is impossible to conclude whether the appearance of life on Earth was inevitable, or an incredibly unlikely chemical accident. The question about the existence (or not) of extraterrestrial life in the Milky Way may therefore be answerable only via an aggressive astronomical search for life itself." | 4 min read PUZZLER Can you unscramble this image of our cover from December 1909? The assembled illustration is a steelworks in Gary, Ind., which is featured in a long article in the issue.  More Puzzles Mass coral die-offs are profoundly depressing, especially if you've had the privilege of swimming among these beautiful organisms. Some good news: Surveys have shown that coral rebounded after major bleaching events in 1998 and 2005, meaning recovery can be possible. And scientists are working to save some corals by transplanting particularly heat-resistant organisms.  Please send any ideas, comments or feedback on this newsletter to: newsletters@sciam.com. See you tomorrow!   —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor

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