The Evolution of Earth: 35 Remarkable Facts From Its Past

Scientists have discovered the earth’s lost 8th continent. Plate tectonics separated this Greenland sized continent from North Africa more than 200 million years ago. Most of this continent was situated underwater and formed shallow, tropical seas in which sediment deposited, for example in large coral reefs. Without realizing it, vast numbers of tourists spend their holiday each year on this lost continent which is presently buried under Southern Europe and has been named Greater Adria.

Newly discovered fossils show that moths and butterflies have been on the planet for at least 200 million years whereas flowering plants came along around 130 million years ago. So butterflies survived without flowers for 70 million years.

If the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs (66 million years ago) arrived just 30 seconds later, it would have landed in deep ocean water which would have absorbed much of the force of the impact. The resulting extinction would have been less severe, many dinosaur species would have survived, and humans would not exist today.

After the age of the dinosaurs came to an end some 65 million years ago, a ‘tribe’ of ants known to scientists as the Attini decided to give up life as hunter-gatherers and become farmers instead. The ants, native to South America, began farming fungus that grew on decomposing wood. This allowed ant colonies to increase in size until 15 million years ago. Humans only came up with the idea of agriculture 10,000 years ago.

The earliest form of grasses didn't exist until 60 and 55 million years ago, towards the end of the major extinction events that ended the age of dinosaurs and the Cretaceous period. So most likely dinosaurs had to eat leaves instead of grass because common grass hadn’t evolved yet.

Whales evolved from wolf sized land animals that roamed the planet around 50 million years ago. Presently, there actually are some wolfs on Vancouver Island in Canada that might be starting a similar evolution. They hunt fish for a majority of their food, swim most of the day, and even have developed webbing between their toes.

There is a fern that has such a high level of atmospheric carbon sequestration that it caused an ice age 49 million years ago. Azolla thrived because of the perfect conditions it found to grow in the North Pole. Large amounts of this fern kept growing and falling to the bottom of some sea without being able to decompose for 800,000 years. It reduced the CO2 levels in the atmosphere so much that it became a threat to its own survivability.

Messinian salinity crisis was an event that occurred more than 5 million years ago during which the entire Mediterranean Sea evaporated and dried out after the closure of the Strait of Gibraltar. This event caused the Mediterranean to become far saltier than the Atlantic Ocean. When the strait opened up again it refilled somewhat rapidly in the event that is known as the Zanclean Flood.

We are presently still in the ice age that began 2.6 million years ago at the start of the Pleistocene epoch, because the Greenland, Arctic, and Antarctic ice sheets still exist. Even less well understood are the cycles of comparative balminess between ice ages, known as interglacials. It is mildly unnerving to reflect that the whole of meaningful history - the development of farming, the creation of towns, the rise of math and writing and science and all the rest - has taken place within an atypical patch of fair weather. While many interglacials seemed to last as little as 8000 years ours has reached 10000 currently.

Scientists have recently found evidence that suggests that a supernova explosion that occurred 2.6 million years ago and 160 light-years away from the earth directly led to extinctions of many marine megafauna species on earth because of exposure to the supernova’s deadly muon radiation. Interestingly hominids and land megafauna survived this extinction event.