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A life form (also spelled life-form or lifeform) is an entity that is living, [1] [2] such as plants , animals , and fungi . It is estimated that more than 99% of all species that ever existed on Earth, amounting to over five billion species, [3] are extinct. [4] [5] Earth is the only celestial body known to harbor life forms. No form of ...
The timeline of the evolutionary history of life represents the current scientific theory outlining the major events during the development of life on planet Earth. Dates in this article are consensus estimates based on scientific evidence , mainly fossils .
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 ...
Edward Hitchcock's fold-out paleontological chart in his 1840 Elementary Geology. Although tree-like diagrams have long been used to organise knowledge, and although branching diagrams known as claves ("keys") were omnipresent in eighteenth-century natural history, it appears that the earliest tree diagram of natural order was the 1801 "Arbre botanique" (Botanical Tree) of the French ...
The therapsids had temporal fenestrae larger and more mammal-like than pelycosaurs, their teeth showed more serial differentiation, their gait was semi-erect and later forms had evolved a secondary palate. 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 ...
Life forms: (1) Phanerophyte, (2; 3) Chamaephyte, (4) Hemicryptophyte, (5; 6) Geophyte, (7) Helophyte, (8; 9) Hydrophyte. Therophyte and epiphyte are not shown. The Raunkiær system is a system for categorizing plants using life-form categories, devised by Danish botanist Christen C. Raunkiær and later extended by various authors.
This clickable timeline template, wikilinked to over 30 Wikipedia articles, translated into over 30 languages, edited by over 110 editors, transcluded to over 100 articles, was originally derived from {{Life timeline}} for inclusion in the article "Timeline of the evolutionary history of life".
Some computer models suggest life began as early as 4.5 billion years ago. [36] [37] The oldest evidence of life is indirect in the form of isotopic fractionation processes. Microorganisms will preferentially use the lighter isotope of an atom to build biomass, as it takes less energy to break the bonds for metabolic processes. [38]