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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 ...
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.
The first eon in Earth's history, the Hadean, begins with the Earth's formation and is followed by the Archean eon at 3.8 Ga. [2]: 145 The oldest rocks found on Earth date to about 4.0 Ga, and the oldest detrital zircon crystals in rocks to about 4.4 Ga, [34] [35] [36] soon after the formation of the Earth's crust and the Earth itself.
A variation of this analogy instead compresses Earth's 4.6 billion year-old history into a single day: While the Earth still forms at midnight, and the present day is also represented by midnight, the first life on Earth would appear at 4:00 am, dinosaurs would appear at 10:00 pm, the first flowers 10:30 pm, the first primates 11:30 pm, and ...
All life on Earth can be traced back to a Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA—and it likely lived on Earth only 400 million years after its formation.
For decades, scientists have theorized that volcanic lightning on an early Earth played a crucial role in kickstarting life on the planet by breaking molecules into useful, biological components.
A secondary palate enables the animal to eat and breathe at the same time and is a sign of a more active, perhaps warm-blooded, way of life. [21] They had lost gastralia and, possibly, scales. 260-230 Ma Cynognathus. One subgroup of therapsids, the cynodonts, lose pineal eye and lumbar ribs and very likely became warm-blooded.
"In addition, the fact that these chemical building blocks of life can be formed in space and are widespread throughout the solar system increases the chances that life could have started beyond ...