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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 natural history of Earth concerns the development of planet Earth from its formation to the present day. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Nearly all branches of natural science have contributed to understanding of the main events of Earth's past, characterized by constant geological change and biological evolution .
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 ...
Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes (natural selection, common descent, speciation) that produced the diversity of life on Earth. It is also defined as the study of the history of life forms on Earth. Evolution holds that all species are related and gradually change over generations. [1]
The Paleozoic is a time in Earth's history when active complex life forms evolved, took their first foothold on dry land, and when the forerunners of all multicellular life on Earth began to diversify. There are six periods in the Paleozoic era: Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous and Permian. [10]
Henry Fairfield Osborn wrote in his work on the history of evolutionary thought, From the Greeks to Darwin (1894): Among the Christian Fathers the movement towards a partly naturalistic interpretation of the order of Creation was made by Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century, and was completed by Augustine in the fourth and fifth centuries ...
In biology, evolution is the process of change in all forms of life over generations, and evolutionary biology is the study of how evolution occurs. Biological populations evolve through genetic changes that correspond to changes in the organisms ' observable traits .
It is widely believed that the early Earth was dominated by vertical tectonic processes, such as stagnant lid, [19] [20] heat-pipe, [21] or sagduction, [22] [23] [24] which eventually transitioned to plate tectonics during the planet's mid-stage evolution. However, an alternative view proposes that Earth never experienced a vertical tectonic ...