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LiveScience
LiveScience
Tiffany Taylor

Meet LUCA, the 4.2 billion-year-old cell that's the ancestor of all life on Earth today

Luca Earth Philip Donoghue the University of Bristol
A digital illustration of a simple rod-shaped organism with small viruses attacking from its surface.

Everything alive today descends from a cell that lived 4.2 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after Earth formed, new research suggests.

That last universal common ancestor, which biologists affectionately nicknamed LUCA, wasn't so different from fairly complex bacteria alive today — and it lived in an ecosystem teeming with other species of life and viruses.

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