Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Cyanobacteria are ubiquitous in marine environments and play important roles as primary producers. They are part of the marine phytoplankton, which currently contributes almost half of the Earth's total primary production. [ 33 ] About 25% of the global marine primary production is contributed by cyanobacteria.
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 timeline displays a graphical representation of the adaptations; the text attempts to explain the nature and robustness of the evidence. Plant evolution is an aspect of the study of biological evolution, predominantly involving evolution of plants suited to live on land, greening of various land masses by the filling of their niches with ...
The evolution of bacteria has progressed over billions of years since the Precambrian time with their first major divergence from the archaeal / eukaryotic lineage roughly 3.2-3.5 billion years ago. [ 1 ][ 2 ] This was discovered through gene sequencing of bacterial nucleoids to reconstruct their phylogeny.
The evolution of photosynthesis refers to the origin and subsequent evolution of photosynthesis, the process by which light energy is used to assemble sugars from carbon dioxide and a hydrogen and electron source such as water. It is believed that the pigments used for photosynthesis initially were used for protection from the harmful effects ...
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 ...
Land plants evolved from a group of freshwater green algae, perhaps as early as 850 mya, [3] but algae-like plants might have evolved as early as 1 billion years ago. [2] The closest living relatives of land plants are the charophytes, specifically Charales; if modern Charales are similar to the distant ancestors they share with land plants, this means that the land plants evolved from a ...
The earliest known life forms on Earth may be as old as 4.1 billion years (or Ga) according to biologically fractionated graphite inside a single zircon grain in the Jack Hills range of Australia. [2] The earliest evidence of life found in a stratigraphic unit, not just a single mineral grain, is the 3.7 Ga metasedimentary rocks containing ...