News From the Field
Oxygen's Challenge to Early Life

January 5, 2011

Researchers at the University of California, Riverside, report that the transition from a generally oxygen-rich ocean during the Cambrian to the fully oxygenated ocean we have today was not a simple turn of the switch, as has been widely accepted. Their work shows the ocean fluctuated between oxygenation states 499 million years ago; such fluctuations, they say, played a major, perhaps dominant, role in shaping the early evolution of animals on the planet. Full Story

Source
University of California, Riverside

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