od onto t before 11P.M. and ters of an ty-one minutes to midnige and seventeen seconds before midnigory, on timebarely an instant. t tly speeded-up day continents slide about and bangtoget a clip t seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt a t timesevery minute, some marking t ofa Manson-sized meteor or one even larger. It’s a anyt all can survive insuctled environment. In fact, not many things do for long.
Perive reme recentness as a part of ture is to stretco t extent and imagine tire ory of to Joance from tips of one o t of ther is Precambrian.
All of complex life is in one roke e ory.”
Fortunately, t moment t it erject a note of gloom just at t, but t is t tremely pertinent quality about life on Eart goes extinct. Quite regularly. For all trouble take to assemble and preserve tinely. And t, to go extinct. terribly ambitious.
So anytime life does somet is quite an event, and feful to t stage in our narrative and came out of the sea.
Land : , dry, batense ultraviolet radiation,lacking t makes movement in er comparatively effortless. to live onland, creatures o undergo s backbone too o support it. to survive out of er, marinecreatures needed to come up ernal arcecture—not t ofadjustment t . Above all and most obviously, any land creature o take its oxygen directly from ter it from er.
t trivial co overcome. On tive to leave ter: it ting dangerous doinents into a single landmass, Pangaea, meant tline tal at. So competition tling neype of predator on tly designed forattack t it s emergence: tious time to find an alternative environment to er.
Plants began tion about 450 million years ago, accompanied ofnecessity by tiny mites and ot to break doter on took a little longer to emerge, but by about 400million years ago turing out of ter, too. Popular illustrations o envision t venturesome land dious fiso puddle duringdroug, t visible mobile residents ondry land tle bugs (crustaceans, in fact) t are commonly