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The history of life on Earth traces the processes by which living and extinct organisms evolved, from the earliest emergence of life to the present day. Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago (abbreviated as Ga, for gigaannum) and evidence suggests that life emerged prior to 3.7 Ga. [1] [2] [3] The similarities among all known present-day species indicate that they have diverged through the ...
Fortey used this book to explain how life has evolved over the last four billion years. He discusses evolution, biology, the origin of life, and paleontology. Under its various titles Fortey's book has become a best-seller; according to WorldCat, it is in over a thousand public libraries in the United States alone.
The earliest evidence for life on Earth includes: 3.8 billion-year-old biogenic hematite in a banded iron formation of the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt in Canada; [30] graphite in 3.7 billion-year-old metasedimentary rocks in western Greenland; [31] and microbial mat fossils in 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone in Western Australia.
Earth is the only place in the universe known to harbor life, where it exists in myriad environments. [8] [9] The origin of life on Earth was at least 3.5 billion years ago, possibly as early as 3.8-4.1 billion years ago. [2] [3] [4] Since its emergence, life has persisted in several geological environments.
Starting in 1985, researchers proposed that life arose at hydrothermal vents, [237] [238] that spontaneous chemistry in the Earth's crust driven by rock–water interactions at disequilibrium thermodynamically underpinned life's origin [239] [240] and that the founding lineages of the archaea and bacteria were H 2-dependent autotrophs that used ...
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The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: The Emergence of the Fourth Geosphere (2016) is a book by Eric Smith and biophysicist Harold J. Morowitz which provides an introduction to origins of life research via a review of perspectives from a variety of fields active in this research area, including geochemistry, biochemistry, ecology, and microbiology.