For many, a new year means a fresh start, and looking back over the history of our planet, there have been many new beginnings, some of them after such dramatic endings that they've changed the course of life itself.
From the start of it all with the first living cells, to some of the most cataclysmic events our earth has seen, let's take a look at some of these!
Around 2.5 billion years ago, tiny microbes reshaped the planet by producing oxygen, triggering one of the earliest mass extinctions, and paving the way for complex life, and eventually us, to evolve.
Fast forward, and we hit the Big Five mass extinctions, times when huge percentages of life vanished.
The most dramatic was the Permian-Triassic 'P-T' extinction, around 252 million years ago, known more commonly as "The Great Dying", when up to 90% of marine species disappeared, including some of our faves like the Trilobites. Forests collapsed. Ecosystems reset. Life nearly lost its grip entirely, it's incredible how close it all came to just being blotted out, and we'd never have been here to know about it.
But from that devastation, reptiles rose to prominence, and thus began the time of the Dinosaurs.
Later, after the Cretaceous–Paleogene (formally the Cretaceous–Tertiary, or 'K-T', with k from the German word for chalk 'Kreide' so as not to confuse with the C from Carboniferous ) extinction 66 million years ago wiped out all the non-avian dinosaurs, and around 75% of all life. Mammals then stepped into the gaps left behind. Without that asteroid, there would be no age of mammals, and no humans to dig up those fossils and wonder how it all happened.
Fun fact: After mass extinctions, life doesn’t bounce back instantly. It can take millions of years for ecosystems to recover, but when they do, evolution often takes bold new directions that would never have happened otherwise.
