An earth made for life

[…] And that’s not the only thing special about naked Butler Field red algae. Coyly cooled ban kier these creatures had apparently learned to do something that is arguably even more important.
One of the trajectories of this development is to produce male and female plants. Males produce lots and lots of little spiroides cells and female plants produce few relatively large spiroides cells. And on that basis, we can recognize that there are male and female plants and there you go. This is the first evidence of sex on this planet. There are no older instances of de-minis rated sexual reproduction than this twelve hundred million year old red alga. So there you go.
Entitled “Pos”, one point two billion years ago, algae were already getting hot and steamy, but there’s still more than six hundred million years to go before vigorous active animals appear on Earth. So what else did life need to learn? Here we are. Can’t make it. You can see the contact between the black organic rich shells from ahead 60 miles.
Back in the Grand Canyon, Carl Costa has taken me up to “name of the place”. It is an unbelievably stip hot climb along a knife-edge ridge scattered with vicious dying cactaceas called Spanish daggers which unfortunately lived up to their name. But when we reach the top, and he shows me the creatures fossilized in rocks called the woke up formation I forget my cuts and bruises. Well you can see the black shells here of the woke up, remember. If you break open the rocks won’t carry out the camera.
See they’re very black inside and never faint, smell of hydrocarbons and they contain up to 7 percent organic carbon - it smells like oil - that’s a good source rock If you’re hunting for oil, in fact, there are explorationists who think the rock will be a good source rock.
This is organic carbons Precambrian, but the amount of dead creatures in here is great. That’s 7 hundred and 50 million years old and what gets it to the dark color is the black organic carbon on it