Who Were The First Organisms To Live On Land?
Life in the Ediacaran Sea? Ryan SommaMost scientists give the credit to a group of mossy swamp-dwellers that originated underwater, but new evidence points to a mysterious life-form that lived--and died--millions of years earlier. A new paper out in the journal Nature this week has stirred up an old debate among geologists about when, exactly, life on Earth first colonized dry land. The conventional viewpoint is that the first terrestrial life migrated out of the water about 430 million years ago, in the midst of a period known as the "Cambrian Explosion of Life"--an evolutionary heyday when favorable conditions allowed life to swell and branch into most of the major forms in existence today. During this time, the theory goes, a group of freshwater plants inched their way onto muddy shores and into swamps and watery lowlands, and true land plants evolved from there. Before that, there was nothing living...