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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 ...
The geological history of the Earth follows the major geological events in Earth's past based on the geological time scale, a system of chronological measurement based on the study of the planet's rock layers ( stratigraphy ). Earth formed about 4.54 billion years ago by accretion from the solar nebula, a disk-shaped mass of dust and gas left ...
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 . In biology, evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable ...
The geologic time scale is a way of representing deep time based on events that have occurred throughout Earth's history, a time span of about 4.54 ± 0.05 Ga (4.54 billion years). [5] It chronologically organises strata, and subsequently time, by observing fundamental changes in stratigraphy that correspond to major geological or ...
The earliest undisputed evidence of life on Earth dates at least from 3.5 billion years ago, [9] [10] [11] during the Eoarchean Era, after a geological crust started to solidify following the earlier molten Hadean Eon. There are microbial mat fossils such as stromatolites found in 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone discovered in Western Australia.
Following the development of radiometric age-dating in the early 20th century, measurements of lead in uranium-rich minerals showed that some were in excess of a billion years old. [8] The oldest such minerals analyzed to date—small crystals of zircon from the Jack Hills of Western Australia —are at least 4.404 billion years old.
The Geologic Calendar is a scale in which the geological timespan of the Earth is mapped onto a calendrical year; that is to say, the day one of the Earth took place on a geologic January 1 at precisely midnight, and today's date and time is December 31 at midnight. [1] On this calendar, the inferred appearance of the first living single-celled ...
Earliest known life forms. Evidence of possibly the oldest forms of life on Earth has been found in hydrothermal vent precipitates. [1] The earliest known life forms on Earth may be as old as 4.1 billion years old (or Ga) according to biologically fractionated graphite inside a single zircon grain in the Jack Hills range of Australia. [2] The ...