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For the summer, “The Lab” has a co-host. My brother Phil hops onboard. We’ll be putting out a ten to twenty minute episode each Thursday night. In this episode, we attempt to cover the last 177 episodes in just one.
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It’s been a year since the first episode of this podcast came out. To celebrate, I had my brother Phil join me. We talked of the show and science and a little bit about sensory substitution and the vOICe. The conversation lasted for about a half hour. I edited it down to roughly ten minutes. It’s a little disjointed, but then again, so are we. I hope you have at least half as much fun listening as we had recording.
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During the Permian, the land vertebrates grew to large sizes, the ancestors of some families of coniferous trees began to dominate the forests, and some small reptiles learned to glide from tree to tree. At the end of the period, the most devastating mass extinction event in Earth’s history happened, wiping out most of the life on land and in the oceans, and setting the stage for the next period, and the rise of the dinosaurs.
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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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I don’t use light in my house. I can’t see it, sometimes it doesn’t occur to me until someone comes over and asks for the stuff. Then I can tell an old joke that still gets a chuckle one time in ten, and go turn on the lamp I keep for just such occasions.
I put on this pair of smart glasses. They’re sort of like having a smart phone strapped to your face. I’m told the display is rather nifty; though of the two people who have checked it out, one complained of eyestrain, stinging in his eyes from the very close, slightly too bright light; and the other wears prescription glasses, so the display ended up rather blurry for him.
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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.