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Earliest evidence (from rocks) that oxygen was in the atmosphere 1.2 billion years ago Red and brown algae become structurally more complex than bacteria 0.75 billion years ago Green algae outperform red and brown algae in the strong light of shallow water 0.475 billion years ago First land plants – mosses and liverworts 0.423 billion years ago
The first fossil records of vascular plants, that is, land plants with vascular tissues, appeared in the Silurian period. The earliest known representatives of this group (mostly from the northern hemisphere) are placed in the genus Cooksonia. They had very simple branching patterns, with the branches terminated by flattened sporangia.
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 ...
Fossils preserved within ancient rock may prove that photosynthesis started way earlier than we thought.
The earliest evidence for life on Earth includes: 3.8 billion-year-old biogenic hematite in a banded iron formation of the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt in Canada; [30] graphite in 3.7 billion-year-old metasedimentary rocks in western Greenland; [31] and microbial mat fossils in 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone in Western Australia.
Oxygenic photosynthesis is the main source of oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere, and its earliest appearance is sometimes referred to as the oxygen catastrophe. Geological evidence suggests that oxygenic photosynthesis, such as that in cyanobacteria , became important during the Paleoproterozoic era around two billion years ago.
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The Purple Earth Hypothesis (PEH) is an astrobiological hypothesis, first proposed by molecular biologist Shiladitya DasSarma in 2007, [1] that the earliest photosynthetic life forms of Early Earth were based on the simpler molecule retinal rather than the more complex porphyrin-based chlorophyll, making the surface biosphere appear purplish ...