NATS 3200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Feathered Dinosaur, Tropical Rainforest, Crete
28 Nov 2016
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Document Summary
Dinosaurs paved the way for the age of mammals. Our planet is about 4. 5 billion years old. Some of the oldest rocks still at the surface of the earth are found in south west. Original rocks on the surface of the earth didn"t survive: new land is being created all the time. Some of them are emerging as we speak (for example hawaii) First billion years = no life: very rough place to be, extremely hot, impossible to breath because there"s virtually no oxygen in the atmosphere, meteorites would rain down on the earth. The ones that still exist look and function the same way as before. Between 3. 5 and 2. 1 billion years = only bacteria (a variety) 500 000 million years ago there was a big explosion: more diverse life appeared. 5 mass extinctions on earth: need to have biodiversity to begin with before we can have mass extinctions.
