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The Permian period 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 …
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the Carboniferous period 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 …
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 …
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The Silurian period 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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The Ordovician period 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 …
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The Cambrian period 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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catching up with early life 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 …
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Let’s get back to life Today, I share a bit of what’s happened with my digital organisms, my ongoing experiments with some software-based artificial life I wrote, and talk about where we’re going next. The general system is very close to where I wanted it in order to implement, oh, just so many experiments. Since …