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The history of paleontology traces the history of the effort to understand the history of life on Earth by studying the fossil record left behind by living organisms. Since it is concerned with understanding living organisms of the past, paleontology can be considered to be a field of biology, but its historical development has been closely tied to geology and the effort to understand the ...
The ancient Greek philosopher Xenophanes (570–480 BCE) concluded from fossil sea shells that some areas of land were once under water. [35] During the Middle Ages the Persian naturalist Ibn Sina, known as Avicenna in Europe, discussed fossils and proposed a theory of petrifying fluids on which Albert of Saxony elaborated in the 14th century. [35]
The first known footprints on land date to 530 Ma. [74] 520 Ma Earliest graptolites. [75] 511 Ma Earliest crustaceans. [76] 505 Ma Fossilization of the Burgess Shale: 500 Ma Jellyfish have existed since at least this time. 485 Ma First vertebrates with true bones (jawless fishes). 450 Ma First complete conodonts and echinoids appear. 440 Ma
As for life on land, in 2019 scientists reported the discovery of a fossilized fungus, named Ourasphaira giraldae, in the Canadian Arctic, that may have grown on land a billion years ago, well before plants are thought to have been living on land. [99] [100] [101] The earliest life on land may have been bacteria 3.22 billion years ago. [102]
Examples of Clovis and other Paleoindian point forms, markers of archaeological cultures in North America. The Solutrean hypothesis on the peopling of the Americas is the claim that the earliest human migration to the Americas began from Europe during the Solutrean Period, with Europeans traveling along pack ice in the Atlantic Ocean.
The history of biology traces the study of the living world from ancient to modern times. Although the concept of biology as a single coherent field arose in the 19th century, the biological sciences emerged from traditions of medicine and natural history reaching back to Ayurveda, ancient Egyptian medicine and the works of Aristotle, Theophrastus and Galen in the ancient Greco-Roman world.
By the first decade of the 21st century it was accepted that epigenetic mechanisms were a necessary part of the evolutionary origin of cellular differentiation. [174] Although epigenetics in multicellular organisms is generally thought to be involved in differentiation, with epigenetic patterns "reset" when organisms reproduce, there have been ...
The name "Pangaea" is derived from Ancient Greek pan (πᾶν, "all, entire, whole") and Gaia or Gaea (Γαῖα, "Mother Earth, land"). [4] [9] The first to suggest that the continents were once joined and later separated may have been Abraham Ortelius in 1596. [10]