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Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth - Updated Edition
Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth - Updated Edition
Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth - Updated Edition
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Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth - Updated Edition

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Australopithecines, dinosaurs, trilobites--such fossils conjure up images of lost worlds filled with vanished organisms. But in the full history of life, ancient animals, even the trilobites, form only the half-billion-year tip of a nearly four-billion-year iceberg. Andrew Knoll explores the deep history of life from its origins on a young planet to the incredible Cambrian explosion, presenting a compelling new explanation for the emergence of biological novelty.


The very latest discoveries in paleontology--many of them made by the author and his students--are integrated with emerging insights from molecular biology and earth system science to forge a broad understanding of how the biological diversity that surrounds us came to be. Moving from Siberia to Namibia to the Bahamas, Knoll shows how life and environment have evolved together through Earth's history. Innovations in biology have helped shape our air and oceans, and, just as surely, environmental change has influenced the course of evolution, repeatedly closing off opportunities for some species while opening avenues for others.


Readers go into the field to confront fossils, enter the lab to discern the inner workings of cells, and alight on Mars to ask how our terrestrial experience can guide exploration for life beyond our planet. Along the way, Knoll brings us up-to-date on some of science's hottest questions, from the oldest fossils and claims of life beyond the Earth to the hypothesis of global glaciation and Knoll's own unifying concept of ''permissive ecology.''


In laying bare Earth's deepest biological roots, Life on a Young Planet helps us understand our own place in the universe--and our responsibility as stewards of a world four billion years in the making.


In a new preface, Knoll describes how the field has broadened and deepened in the decade since the book's original publication.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateMar 22, 2015
ISBN9781400866045
Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth - Updated Edition
Author

Andrew H. Knoll

Andrew H. Knoll is the Fisher Professor of Natural History at Harvard University. His honors include the International Prize for Biology, the Charles Doolittle Walcott and the Mary Clark Thompson Medals of the National Academy of Sciences, the Paleontological Society Medal, and the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society of London. For nearly two decades he served on the science team for NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover mission. Knoll is also the author of Life on a Young Planet, for which he received the Phi Beta Kappa Book Award in Science.

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    Life on a Young Planet - Andrew H. Knoll

    Andrew H. Knoll

    with a new preface by the author

    PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

    PRINCETON AND OXFORD

    Copyright © 2003 by Princeton University Press

    Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

    In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

    First Princeton Science Library printing, 2005

    New Princeton Science Library paperback edition, with a new preface by the author, 2015

    Paperback ISBN 978-0-691-16553-0

    Library of Congress Control Number 2014955273

    British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

    This book has been composed in Palatino

    Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

    press.princeton.edu

    Printed in the United States of America

    1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

    Acknowledgments    ix

    Preface to the New Paperback Edition    xi

    Prologue    1

    Chapter 1 In the Beginning?    6

    Chapter 2 The Tree of Life    16

    Chapter 3 Life’s Signature in Ancient Rocks    32

    Chapter 4 The Earliest Glimmers of Life    50

    Chapter 5 The Emergence of Life    72

    Chapter 6 The Oxygen Revolution    89

    Chapter 7 The Cyanobacteria, Life’s Microbial Heroes    108

    Chapter 8 The Origins of Eukaryotic Cells    122

    Chapter 9 Fossils of Early Eukaryotes    139

    Chapter 10 Animals Take the Stage    161

    Chapter 11 Cambrian Redux    179

    Chapter 12 Dynamic Earth, Permissive Ecology    206

    Chapter 13 Paleontology ad Astra    225

    Epilogue    243

    Further Reading    247

    Index    269

    THIS VOLUME distills the thoughts of a quarter century spent trying to understand the early history of life. I first entertained the idea of writing a book more than a decade ago, but fortunately got sidetracked. Children, research, and university responsibilities kept me from reconsidering such a plunge until the fall of 1998, when the alignment of growing kids, the end of my term as department chair, and a sabbatical leave convinced me that the time was right to attempt what for me was a new style of scholarship. Of course, my children weren’t the only ones who had matured in the interim, and so whatever critical fate awaits this volume, I can honestly state that it is far better than it would have been had I completed it at first consideration.

    For all the caricatures of scientists as creative loners, science is a richly social endeavor. Our worldviews evolve by reading the works of those who went before, by teaching and learning, through collaboration, conversation, and argument. The ideas and experiences related in the following pages owe much to others, many of them mentioned in one chapter or another. Elso Barghoorn guided my thesis research, providing me with opportunities, support, and a collegiality whose obvious asymmetry he never stressed. My graduate education was shaped as well by Ray Siever, Dick Holland, Steve Golubic, and the late Steve Gould and Bernie Kummel, all of whom seemed to spot in me a potential I would never have seen for myself.

    The students and postdoctoral fellows in my lab have been a continuing source of joy and intellectual sustenance, and I thank them all. I have also benefited enormously from wonderful colleagues. My friends in biology and the Earth sciences at Harvard keep me ever on my toes.

    In the world beyond Harvard Yard, I am particularly grateful for the friendship and intellectual stimulation of John Grotzinger, Sam Bowring, John Hayes, Malcolm Walter, Roger Summons, Keene Swett, Yin Leiming, Misha Semikhatov, Misha Fedonkin, Volodya Sergeev, Gerard Germs, Stefan Bengtson, Simon Conway Morris, Brian Harland, Don Canfield, Ariel Anbar, Dave Des Marais, Ken Nealson, Sean Carroll, and my departed friends Zhang Yun, Gonzalo Vidal, and Preston Cloud.

    Of course, books are not written in the office or in the field. They get finished in the upstairs study, on weeknights after the homework is done. Book writing, therefore, is very much a family affair. In a profession that commonly rewards obsession, my children have given me the gift of balance in life. And even by confessing that I lack words to articulate my gratitude, I risk trivializing the importance of my wife Marsha.

    Much of my research over the years has been funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA, including the NASA Astrobiology Institute. I am grateful for their support. I also thank Dick Bambach, Susannah Porter, Don Canfield, Sean Carroll, Jack Repcheck, Kristen Gager, Lawrence Krauss, and Marsha Knoll for reading my draft manuscript and making many suggestions for improvement. John Bauld, Roger Buick, Stefan Bengtson, Martin Brasier, Birger Rasmussen, Shuhai Xiao, Richard Jenkins, Leonid Popov, Dave Bottjer, Steve Dornbos, Greg Wray, Andreas Teske, Susannah Porter, Bruce Lieberman, and Nick Butterfield provided some of the illustrations that leaven my text. Lastly, I thank Sam Elworthy and Princeton University Press for their unstinting support and confidence. Sam has been my Maxwell Perkins, improving every page of what follows.

    FOURTEEN YEARS AGO, amid millennial predictions of global computer failure and other apocalypses that never transpired, I decided it was time to explain myself. For more than two decades, I had been preoccupied with the attempt to understand an unfamiliar planet—one without plants or animals, and with little or no oxygen in the atmosphere. That planet was the young Earth, and how our globe transited from that early, alien state to the world we know today struck me (and still does) as the greatest story Earth science has to tell. In part the quest was paleontological, requiring the meticulous examination of ancient rocks in search of fossilized microbes. In part it was phylogenetic, using the information recorded in genes to sketch out the tree of life, a universal genealogy that makes predictions for life’s geologic record. And in part, the task was geochemical, using the chemistry of ancient rocks to reconstruct Earth’s environmental past. Could we develop a narrative of life’s deep history that stretches from the origin of life to the spread of animals throughout the oceans more than three billion years later? Could we construct a parallel account of environmental history that traces the rise of atmospheric oxygen and episodic ice ages of global extent? And, most importantly, could we combine our narratives of life and environment to understand how organisms and their surroundings have co-evolved through time? The result was Life on a Young Planet, first published in 2003. The decision to reissue this work in a new format affords an opportunity to revisit my earlier effort and consider how the field has progressed over the past decade.

    Standing back, the big picture remains much the same: a limited and challenging record of the Archean (> 2.5 billion years ago) Earth that nonetheless documents microbial ecosystems in a world with little or no O2; a long middle age populated by protists as well as prokaryotes, building diversity and cellular complexity beneath an atmosphere with some but not much oxygen; and a dramatic shift in life and environment around 600 million years ago, ushering in our (broadly) familiar world of large animals and abundant oxygen. And the field vignettes still ring true, hopefully providing readers with a sense of how Earth scientists work and not simply a catalog of facts.

    That said, many people around the world have made important contributions to this story since I first told my version. For example, while it still makes sense to divide life’s history into three great chapters mediated by oxygen, the details of that environmental history have become far more nuanced, and new debates have emerged. We still think that the Archean atmosphere had, at best, minute traces of oxygen, but several lines of evidence now suggest that more substantial O2 accumulations began to form at least intermittently within the oceans much earlier. The subtle and still debated record of Earth’s early whiff of oxygen predates the Great Oxygenation Event 2.4 billion years ago by as much as several hundred million years. Increasing evidence also suggests that when oxygen began to accumulate in the atmosphere and surface ocean, it rose to relatively high levels before declining again by two billion years ago.

    When I wrote Life on a Young Planet, the Proterozoic Eon (2.5 to .542 billion years ago) was just coming into focus as environmentally distinct: more oxygen-rich than the Archean but less so than the Phanerozoic Eon (the past 542 million years). Building on an insightful model by Donald Canfield, Ariel Anbar and I had sketched out what Proterozoic environments may have looked like and how this might have influenced the course of evolution, but data were sparse. Fortunately, a decade of research, using chemical proxies that range from the sedimentary distribution of iron to the isotopic composition of molybdenum, has reinforced the idea of a distinct middle age to Earth history. How much oxygen was present in the atmosphere remains a topic of research, but recent estimates suggest that O2 concentrations remained low through most of the eon, perhaps only a few percent (or even less) of today’s levels.

    Some geochemical data indicate major oxygenation of Earth’s deep oceans near the end of the Proterozoic Eon, but other observations suggest that, despite this event, the climb from low Proterozoic oxygen levels to our familiar O2-rich world was protracted, continuing well into the Paleozoic Era. The beginning of Earth’s second oxygen revolution broadly coincides with the appearance of large animals in the fossil record, but whether a changing environment facilitated animal evolution or evolving animals drove environmental change remains a topic of debate—both may be true. Recent research on oxygen minimum zones—oxygen-poor water masses in modern oceans—indicates that the levels of O2 required to support carnivores and other metabolically demanding animals can be relatively modest, so physiologically significant environmental thresholds may well have been crossed near the end of the Proterozoic Eon, even though global oxygen abundances remained well below modern levels. Among other things, this means that the interwoven histories of oxygen and animals didn’t end with the Cambrian radiation but continued well into the Phanerozoic age of visible animals.

    And what of the fossil record itself? Again, the broad picture presented in 2003 still holds, but new discoveries continue to yield fresh insights. Our understanding of life in early Archean oceans remains limited: more evidence supports a role for microbial mats in building Earth’s oldest stromatolites, and isotopic evidence tells us that 3.5 billion years ago, microorganisms cycled both carbon and sulfur through the oceans. But while Emmanuelle Javaux and her colleagues have now described convincing microfossils from 3.2 billion year old shales, potentially biogenic microstructures in still older rocks remain a challenge to paleontologists. In contrast, the Proterozoic microfossil record, already rich in 2003, continues to grow, with whole new classes of microfossil—for example, phosphatized scales that armored early eukaryote cells—complementing an ever increasing inventory of cyanobacterial remains. Both microfossils and molecular clocks suggest that eukaryotic organisms appeared early in the Proterozoic Eon but radiated much later, an observation that might find explanation in the relatively late evolution of eukaryotic cells that ingest other eukaryotes. Such a functional innovation would have fueled protistan diversification much in the same way that carnivores are thought to have facilitated Cambrian animal radiation.

    New macrofossils continue to be described from Ediacaran rocks, and their foreign shapes still inspire creative interpretations. One sea change: many paleontologists now interpret the quilted fossils so common in Ediacaran strata as structurally simple animals—not much more than upper and lower cell layers surrounding a fluid or jelly-filled interior—that fed by absorbing organic molecules and exchanged oxygen and other gases by diffusion. That idea isn’t so far-fetched. Trichoplax, a tiny animal first discovered in a seawater aquarium, lives in just this way, and, if you think about it, so do you. Your body absorbs organic molecules through your intestines, after you’ve swallowed your food and broken it down by digestion.

    I don’t mean to suggest a plus ça change view of the past decade; with each month, our understanding of the early Earth and the life it sustained continues to deepen and broaden. But the big picture—the major patterns of earth system development visible across eons of time—is pretty well limned out in terms of pattern, while underlying questions of causation remain active targets of research. One topic assayed in Life on a Young Planet, however, has changed fundamentally.

    In my final chapter, titled Paleontology ad astra, I described then gathering interest in life beyond the Earth, catalyzed by an important, if now widely abandoned, claim of biological fingerprints in a meteorite from Mars. Since that time, planetary exploration has been transformed by rovers and orbiters within our solar system and by revolutionary discoveries of planets orbiting other stars. In 2003, as my book was going to press, NASA launched a pair of rovers toward Mars; Spirit and Opportunity have provided unprecedented insights into the environmental history of Mars, for the first time providing a sustained geologist’s-eye view of our planetary neighbor. Remarkably, ten years after landing, Opportunity continues to explore ancient martian sedimentary rocks, telemetering physical and chemical records of another young planet. More recently, a newer and better equipped rover, christened Curiosity, has joined in the exploration of Mars, providing geological evidence for the once unthinkable (or at least, unverifiable) notion that a lake formed early in martian history was habitable. At the same time, a satellite called Kepler has fundamentally changed our conception of the universe, discovering thousands of candidate planets orbiting nearby stars. Most are relatively small, and at least a few look a lot like Earth, confirming that planets like ours—and perhaps life, as well—are widely distributed in our galaxy.

    Books may look forward or backward, but inevitably they register the time and place where they were written. Life on a Young Planet records that moment in time when biologists and Earth scientists began working together to build an integrative picture of our planet’s history. We now know that we can only understand life’s evolutionary trajectory by embedding it in the chronicle of Earth’s dynamic environmental history. That is the lesson of deep Earth history, and it is also a lesson for today, when human technology has emerged as an environmental force of geological prominence. Whether we look outward, searching for a second example of life, or forward, hoping to navigate wisely through an era of mounting global change, the record of Earth and life through time provides a fundamentally important catalog of experience that can help guide our actions.

    IN HIS BRIEF poem When I heard the learn’d astronomer, Walt Whitman recounts an evening spent at a scientific lecture. Proofs and figures fill the hall, oppressively weighting the air,

    Til rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

    In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

    Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

    Although written more than a century ago, Whitman’s poem resonates with a surprisingly large contemporary audience. Earlier attempts to understand the universe and our place in it distilled nature’s mystery into powerful narrative. Science, Whitman implies, replaces awe with statistics.

    But does ignorance really outstrip understanding as the preferred route to wonder? As a paleontologist, I don’t think so. To me, the scientific account of life’s long history abounds in both narrative verve and mystery. Lucy’s skull and diminutive bones, carefully displayed in a museum drawer, transport me to the warm African savanna where humanity took shape 3 million years ago. Dinosaurs take me back twenty to seventy times further, to Mesozoic forests patrolled by astonishing beasts—if I can’t share the awe that Tyrannosaurus inspires in my son, it is, quite simply, a failing of maturity. Older yet are the trilobites, those joint-legged monarchs of the Cambrian seas, skittering around a tropical reef some 500 million years ago.

    The fossils of animals, claimed by popular culture as much as by science, provide a biological chronicle of remarkable proportions. And yet, they record only the most recent chapters in Earth’s immense evolutionary epic. The complete history of life ranges over four billion years, through alien worlds of sulfurous oceans beneath asphyxiating air, past iron-breathing bacteria and microscopic chimeras, to arrive at last at our familiar world of oxygen and ozone, forested valleys, and animals that swim, walk, and fly. Scheherazade could hardly have invented a more engaging tale.

    Figure P.1. The geologic timescale, showing the time relationships of major events in Phanerozoic evolution and the Precambrian rock units discussed in this book. (Ma = million years before present)

    Nor is the story complete in its current telling. It can’t be, because each hard-won fact raises a new question. John Archibald Wheeler, one of the twentieth century’s preeminent physicists, once remarked that we live on an island in a sea of ignorance. This metaphor comes with an insightful corollary: as the island grows, built piece after piece by the accumulation of knowledge, its shoreline—the interface between knowledge and uncertainty—expands proportionately. There is much we do not understand about the history of life, and the same will be true of our grandchildren. But, then, if we knew all there was to know, scientific interest would cease. Textbooks may portray science as a codification of facts, but it is really a disciplined way of asking about the unknown.

    This, then, is a book about history—the history of life before the dinosaurs, before the trilobites, before animals of any kind. My story begins with the initial diversification of animals in Cambrian seas. From there, the scene shifts to older rocks formed in earlier oceans. Having established how we can study life’s deeper history, we explore the fragmentary record of Earth’s earliest organisms and ruminate on the origins of life, before ascending again through geological time, following a trail of fossils and molecules that leads back to the Cambrian Explosion of animal life, now seen as both the culmination of life’s long Precambrian history and a radical departure from it.

    I have three goals in writing this book. First is the obvious one. Narrative history, wrote C. Vann Woodward, is the end product of what historians do. The narrative is where they put it together and make sense for the reader. To me, science’s creation story is a deeply engrossing narrative that, told correctly, helps us to understand not only our biological past, but the Earth and life that surround us today. Contemporary biological diversity is the product of nearly 4 billion years of evolution. We are a part of this legacy. Thus, by coming to grips with life’s long evolutionary history, we begin to understand something of our own place in the world, including our responsibility as planetary stewards.

    My second goal is to tell the story of early evolution in a particular way. The history of life is commonly recounted as a naturalist’s Generations of Abraham: bacteria begat protozoans, protozoans begat invertebrates, invertebrates begat fishes, and the like. Such catalogs of received wisdom can be memorized, but there isn’t a lot to think about. For this reason, I have chosen to relate my story as an enterprise—one in which rocks and fossils are encountered in remote corners of the globe, analyzed in the laboratory, and interpreted in light of processes (but not necessarily conditions) observable today. Discoveries in paleontology, the most traditional of scientific pursuits, weave together with emerging insights from molecular biology and geochemistry.

    In some ways, conventional paleontology and the research described here seem poles apart, their practitioners squinting to view the past through the opposite ends of a telescope. Dinosaur bones are big and spectacular—they keep you awake at night. But, apart from the size of its inhabitants, the world of the dinosaurs was much like our own. In contrast, Earth’s deep history is recounted by microscopic fossils and subtle chemical signals. And yet, the story they tell is dramatic, a succession of vanished worlds that leads through atmospheric transformation and biological revolution to the Earth we know today.

    If we want to understand events that took place a billion or more years ago, how do we go about doing it? It’s one thing to learn that photosynthetic bacteria lived on tidal flats 1.5 billion years ago, and quite another to understand how we recognize microscopic fossils as photosynthetic, how we determine that the rocks enclosing them formed on an ancient tidal flat, and how we estimate their age as 1.5 billion years. The epistemological leitmotif of how we know what we think we know recurs throughout this book. As human enterprise, this is also a story of exploration that extends from the inner space of molecules to the literal outer space of Mars and beyond. Cold nights in Siberia are part of the tale, as are warm friendships in China.

    Finally, having excavated and evaluated the preserved shards of our biological past, I want to step back and ask whether we can identify any general principles that shine through the maze of historical particulars. What are the grand themes of life’s early history? The astrobiologist in me, eager for a glimpse of samples collected on Mars, asks what aspects of our terrestrial biology might be found wherever life exists and which features are likely to prove the specific products of our particular planetary history? We don’t yet know the answer, but how we search for life elsewhere in the universe depends to a large extent on how we think about this question.

    One clear theme of evolutionary history is the cumulative nature of biological diversity. Individual species (of nucleated organisms at least) may come and go in geological succession, their extinctions emphasizing the fragility of populations in a world of competition and environmental change. But the history of guilds—of fundamentally distinct morphological and physiological ways of making a biological living—is one of accrual. The long view of evolution is unmistakably one of accumulation through time, governed by rules of ecosystem function. The replacement series implied by the Generations of Abraham approach fails to capture this basic attribute of biological history.

    Another great theme is the coevolution of Earth and life. Both organisms and environments have changed dramatically through time, and more often than not they have changed in concert. Shifts in climate, in geography, and even in the composition of the atmosphere and oceans have influenced the course of evolution, and biological innovations have, in turn, affected environmental history. Indeed, the overall picture that emerges from our planet’s long history is one of interaction between organisms and environments. The evolutionary epic recorded by fossils reflects, as much as anything else, the continuing interplay between genetic possibility and ecological opportunity.

    This long view of biological history provides what may be the grandest theme of all. Life was born of physical processes at play on the young Earth. These same processes—tectonic, oceanographic, and atmospheric—sustained life through time as they shaped and reshaped our planet’s surface. And, eventually, life expanded and diversified to become a planetary force in its own right, joining tectonics and physical chemistry in the transformation of air and oceans. To me, the emergence of life as a defining—perhaps the defining—feature of our planet is extraordinary. How often has this happened in the vastness of the universe? That’s what I think about when I look up in perfect silence at the stars.

    Awe and humility attended the telling of earlier creation stories. They are appropriate companions to science’s version, as well.

    Fossils found along the Kotuikan River in northern Siberia document the Cambrian Explosion, the remarkable flowering of animal life that began some 543 million years ago. As Charles Darwin recognized more than a century ago, Cambrian fossils raise fundamental questions about life’s earlier evolution. What kind of organisms preceded these already complex animals? Can we find older rocks, and if we can, will they preserve a record of Earth’s earliest biological history?

    Sometimes the past was shot with a hand-held camera; sometimes it reared monumentally inside a proscenium arch with moulded plaster swags and floppy curtains; sometimes it eased along, a love story from the silent era, pleasing, out of focus and wholly implausible. And sometimes there was only a succession of stills to be borrowed from the memory.

    —Julian Barnes

    Staring at the Sun

    THE CLIFFS ALONG the Kotuikan River glow fawn and pink in the late afternoon sun (figure 1.1). Elsewhere, in North America or in Europe, a vista like this would be celebrated as a national park, its approaches flanked by campgrounds and souvenir shops. But here, in the forested wilderness of northern Siberia, its pastel beauty is both unremarkable and largely unseen. From a sheltered niche halfway up the cliff, I look up at my friend Misha Semikhatov perched high above the river, his large frame barely supported by a narrow ledge. The drop beneath his feet is precipitous, but Misha’s attention is elsewhere, fixed on a layer of sedimentary rocks just above his head. To his experienced eye, the bed of crinkly laminated limestones tells of an ancient tidal flat that bordered a vanished ocean, a broad expanse of shoreline exposed at low tide, covered by thickly matted bacteria, and occasionally crossed by small animals. As I rest against the rock face, observing marginally older beds, jotting in my notebook, and swatting mosquitoes (not necessarily in that order), I reflect on what has brought Misha and me to this remote spot high above the Arctic Circle (figure 1.2). The literal answer is a giant Soviet-era military helicopter that deposited us, a small group of colleagues, and a ton of gear some seventy miles upstream. From there, small rubber rafts floated us like Huckleberry Finn slowly down the river, through canyons of limestone, beneath circling falcons, past wolves that howl at the midnight sun, to this wild and beautiful place.

    Figure 1.1. Fossiliferous cliffs along the Kotuikan River in Siberia. The distance from river level to the top of the cliff is more than 300 feet, recording some 20 million years of Early Cambrian history.

    Of course, helicopters provide only one of several appropriate responses to the question of what brought us here. The deeper and more interesting answer is that these cliffs, cut over the millennia by the Kotuikan as it winds toward the Arctic Ocean, record one of Earth history’s great turning points. As well as any rocks known anywhere, they document the remarkable diversification of animal life popularly known as the Cambrian Explosion. In the broadest possible sense, the Kotuikan cliffs record the beginnings of the modern world, a world in which animals swim, crawl, or walk beneath an atmosphere of breathable air. That’s really what brought us here.

    At river level, a series of steps rise out of the water like prehistoric ghats, hewn by nature from thin beds of limestone and dolomite. Some 545 million years ago, these rocks were deposited as lime muds in a warm shallow seaway not unlike the modern Florida Keys. Scattered clusters of gypsum crystals record drying that episodically left coastal waters salty enough to exclude all but the hardiest bacteria. The fossils of animals are rare in these rocks, and those that can be found are simple. Only a few irregular meanders disturb bedding surfaces, the trails of small wormlike creatures that crawled along the muddy bottom in search of food.

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