s. In the 1980s and 1990s, biologists found that microbial life has an amazing flexibility for surviving in extreme environments - niches that are extraordinarily hot, or cold, or dry, or under immense pressures - that would be completely inhospitable to complex organisms. Some scientists even concluded that life may have begun on Earth in hydrothermal vents far under the ocean's surface. Most known extremophiles are microbes. The domain Archaea contains renowned examples, but extremophiles are… (More on Extremophiles)