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During the Carboniferous, the sharks took over the sea. On land, a new kind of egg was invented that could be laid and hatched on land, instead of in the water. The world was covered with swampy forest, there were giant bugs, and more oxygen in the air than at any other time.
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During the Devonian, there were many firsts: the first animal to give birth to live young, the first trees, the first insects, and the first vertebrates to walk on land.
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After the cold temperatures ice sheets and drop in sea level at the end of the Ordovician, the Silurian enjoyed a warmer and more stable climate. During this time, fish developed jaws, and the first animals adapted to a life lived entirely on land appear in the fossil record.
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After the die out at the end of the Cambrian, during the beginning of the Ordovician, there was an increase in the variety of animals and plants, with many new species entering the fossil record. Chordates became fish, plants colonized the land, corals began forming reefs, and the cephalopods came into their own. At the end of the period, wild climatic shifts caused the second most severe extinction event in the history of life.
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In the Cambrian period, roughly 540 million years to 485 million years ago, most of the types of animals that are with us today got their start, even if it’s difficult to recognize them.
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Most of the history of life on our world is about single cells. Life made up of millions-billions-trillions of cells, (just for one critter!) only arrived in the last 700,000,000 years. Life in its single celled form got here 3,400,000,000 years ago. It took life nearly 3 billion years to learn the trick. Continuing the continuing story of Evolution, we look at the Precambrian, and the first multicellular life seen in the fossil record.
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Sometimes, very different organisms can end up having traits in common, even though they didn’t share those traits with an ancestor. Instead, different systems, solving similar problems, can come up with similar answers.
Here’s a link to the episode on eyes.
Here’s a link to an article about the similarities between human and squid eyes.
How Humans And Squid Evolved To Have The Same Eyes
Here’s a link to an episode about a large single-celled creature that came up with leaf like structures.
Ep 141: The largest of the small
Here are the best links I could find about the antlered fly. There was surprisingly little information about them on the internet.
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In episode 139 and 142, I talked about some results I’ve been getting with my experiment with artificial life and digital organisms. I had to rework the death object to make sure that one of the little critters would die and make room for others. But does an unusually long-lived creature really inhibit evolution? I found a counter example—Pando, an 80,000-year old quaking aspen clonal colony. Though it was established during the last ice age, the plant and animal life around it has definitely changed and evolved since then, suggesting that in nature, long lived creatures do not keep evolution from happening.
Here’s a link to a 4-minute and 42-second long video about Pando.
Pando, One of the Oldest and Largest Organisms
Here are links to a couple of articles about this venerable organism.
Pando, the Trembling Giant – Richfield, Utah – Atlas Obscura
And here are some links to information about the last ice age, called the “Pleistocene.”
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In the early 1990/s, a biologist named Thomas Ray created a computer program that acted like a computer infected with many little programs. He called it Tierra, Spanish for “Earth.” The little programs could, and did, mutate, self-replicate, and evolve in strange and wonderful ways.
Here’s the home page for Tierra.
Here’s a good article about Tierra.
Artificial Life – Tools Ideas Environment
And here’s a nice video on the Tierra system, and the story behind its creation.
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Before Core Wars, or the computer game Darwin, just about as soon as a computer was built that could run the program, a rather obscure Italian scientist named Barricelli, did pioneering experiments in digital life. While his work remains largely unknown, it does demonstrate how people have been working on evolving computer code from the very earliest days of computers.
Here’s a link to the talk where I first heard of Barricelli.
George Dyson: The birth of the computer
Here’s a page that includes an implementation of his work, including source code.
Barricelli : Built with Processing and Processing.js
And here’s an article about Barricelli and his work.