Abstract
Life in the sea and in other bodies of water was the only life on earth for 2 billion years or more after the first living organisms appeared. For most of the earth’s history, the exposed land was barren rock. There could be no animals where there were no plants. The conventional view is that the simple one-cell plants known as cyanobacteria (formerly called blue-green algae), which were abundant in the seas by at least 3.5 billion years ago, eventually got a foothold on land and slowly proliferated as some of the primary occupants. Then, about 500 million years ago, higher plants became established and took over. Animals crawled out of the sea to eat the plants, and eventually some of the animals learned to eat the plant-eaters. Higher plants and terrestrial animals were probably well established by 400 million years ago.
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© 1994 Kenneth Maxwell
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Maxwell, K. (1994). The Dry Connection. In: The Sex Imperative. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-5988-1_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-5988-1_6
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