“That is the absolute wackiest interval of Earth history that anyone’s aware of,” said Nick Butterfield, a paleobiologist at Cambridge. “You go in the one end, and it’s this old, dreary, boring microbial world, and you come out the other end after these two massive glaciations, and all of a sudden, there’s animals on the scene, and all the microbes have changed.”
The changes were so striking that in 2006, scientists named a new geological period to encompass them: the Ediacaran. It began around 635 million years ago, with the thawing of “Snowball Earth,” and ended roughly 540 million years ago with the start of the Cambrian Era.
— Read on www.nytimes.com/2026/10/19/science/evolution-life-earth.html
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