“In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath. Nature is anything but simple.”
- Richard Peterson, 1994
Earth is the only celestial body in the enormity of space that is currently known to support life. Life first appeared on this planet sometime between 4.28 billion and 3.5 billion BCE. What caused these early organisms to arise from non-living matter is unknown. What is known is that these first creatures were small microorganisms that lived in and around submarine hydrothermal vents. Over the course of the billions of years following their existence, the natural evolutionary process of speciation caused over five billion species to be created. Everything from fungi to T. rex, from the sharks to the redwood trees, and even you and I evolved from these seemingly insignificant microbes.
But wait, if over five billion species were created, then why is there nowhere near that amount alive today (17 November 2,021 CE)? This is because 99.99% of these organisms are extinct. Extinction is the process which causes a taxon from going from having potentially millions of individual living members to having zero. The moment of extinction is the moment the last member of a taxa (an endling) bites the dust. Due to extinction, of the over five billion species that have ever existed, only between 10 and 14 million are currently alive.
So, now we know that life has existed on Earth for as long as 4.28 billion years and has come in over five billion forms. Now what? Having given you this baseline information, I want to take you on a journey, a journey that’ll transcend the existence of you or I and peel back the layers of time. We are going on an expedition that’ll span billions of years and will examine the rich history of life on the third rock from the Sun.
We’ll take a look at everything from evolution to ecology and from extinction to animal behavior. With each analysis, we’ll ask questions about life and use fundamental scientific knowledge to answer them. Of course, science doesn’t know everything and thus neither will we. It’s inevitable we’ll have more questions than answers at some points on the journey but that’s okay. That’s what science is all about.
My name is Hipporex and I’ll be your guide through the eons. To paraphrase the great time-traveling British naturalist Nigel Marven, I don’t know what we’re gonna see, but whatever happens, this is going to be a cracking adventure.
Welcome newfound friends to The ZooChat Compendium to the History of Life on Earth.
- Richard Peterson, 1994
Earth is the only celestial body in the enormity of space that is currently known to support life. Life first appeared on this planet sometime between 4.28 billion and 3.5 billion BCE. What caused these early organisms to arise from non-living matter is unknown. What is known is that these first creatures were small microorganisms that lived in and around submarine hydrothermal vents. Over the course of the billions of years following their existence, the natural evolutionary process of speciation caused over five billion species to be created. Everything from fungi to T. rex, from the sharks to the redwood trees, and even you and I evolved from these seemingly insignificant microbes.
But wait, if over five billion species were created, then why is there nowhere near that amount alive today (17 November 2,021 CE)? This is because 99.99% of these organisms are extinct. Extinction is the process which causes a taxon from going from having potentially millions of individual living members to having zero. The moment of extinction is the moment the last member of a taxa (an endling) bites the dust. Due to extinction, of the over five billion species that have ever existed, only between 10 and 14 million are currently alive.
So, now we know that life has existed on Earth for as long as 4.28 billion years and has come in over five billion forms. Now what? Having given you this baseline information, I want to take you on a journey, a journey that’ll transcend the existence of you or I and peel back the layers of time. We are going on an expedition that’ll span billions of years and will examine the rich history of life on the third rock from the Sun.
We’ll take a look at everything from evolution to ecology and from extinction to animal behavior. With each analysis, we’ll ask questions about life and use fundamental scientific knowledge to answer them. Of course, science doesn’t know everything and thus neither will we. It’s inevitable we’ll have more questions than answers at some points on the journey but that’s okay. That’s what science is all about.
My name is Hipporex and I’ll be your guide through the eons. To paraphrase the great time-traveling British naturalist Nigel Marven, I don’t know what we’re gonna see, but whatever happens, this is going to be a cracking adventure.
Welcome newfound friends to The ZooChat Compendium to the History of Life on Earth.
The ZooChat Compendium to the History of Life on Earth is the spiritual successor to Hipporex’s Guide to Interesting and Unique Prehistoric Fauna (2019-2021), another thread by prehistoric life-loving me (Hipporex). While this past thread highlighted individual extinct species/genera, the goal of this thread will be to examine life on Earth in a much broader sense. Perhaps species profiles will occasionally return but the posts in this new thread will mainly look at broader facets of life that involve perhaps thousands, millions, or even billions of species.
As I’m sure no one noticed, I have been largely absent from ZooChat lately. While a number of factors caused this, one of them is seeing a sudden lack of maturity in posts made on the forum. I am by no means the only member to have noticed this and several others have been quite open about their frustrations with this phenomena. I have come to a conclusion regarding this matter, one of the ways to stop the spread of this occurrence is for the site’s more mature posters to make posts that’ll encourage the more immature posters to want to create content that positively contributes instead of diminishes credibility. Now I am not saying I am one of these “more mature posters,” as I’ve seen made some stupid posts myself, but I feel a highly educational thread like the one I’m trying to create will, if successful, encourage more “good” posts to be created.
As I’m sure no one noticed, I have been largely absent from ZooChat lately. While a number of factors caused this, one of them is seeing a sudden lack of maturity in posts made on the forum. I am by no means the only member to have noticed this and several others have been quite open about their frustrations with this phenomena. I have come to a conclusion regarding this matter, one of the ways to stop the spread of this occurrence is for the site’s more mature posters to make posts that’ll encourage the more immature posters to want to create content that positively contributes instead of diminishes credibility. Now I am not saying I am one of these “more mature posters,” as I’ve seen made some stupid posts myself, but I feel a highly educational thread like the one I’m trying to create will, if successful, encourage more “good” posts to be created.
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