Scientists recently found oxygen in ocean water could have created earth's first species a press release reported Sunday.
According to a study from the University of Exeter, that is also in the Nature Geoscience science journal, the development of the initial species known to man could have put oxygen into oceans and put life on earth.
"There had been enough oxygen in ocean surface waters for over 1.5 billion years before the first animals evolved, but the dark depths of the ocean remained devoid of oxygen," lead author Tim Lenton of the University of Exeter was quoted as saying in a said in a statement. "We argue that the evolution of the first animals could have played a key role in the widespread oxygenation of the deep oceans. This in turn may have facilitated the evolution of more complex, mobile animals," Lenton said in the statement.
This defeats previous notions that the organisms were created from an increase in oxygen the press release reported.
"The effects we predict suggest that the first animals, far from being a passive response to rising atmospheric oxygen, were the active agents that oxygenated the ocean around 600 million years ago. They created a world in which more complex animals could evolve, including our very distant ancestors," Lenton said in the statement.
″This study provides a plausible mechanism for ocean oxygenation without the requirement for a rise in atmospheric oxygen," Simon Poulton, a professor at the University of Leeds said in a statement.
Scientists studied different ways the ocean could have received oxygen in the Neoproterozoic period of time, and not need more of the gas from the sky, 1,000 to 542 million years ago the press release reported.
"It therefore questions whether the long-standing belief that there was a major rise in atmospheric oxygen at this time is correct. We simply don't know the answer to this at present, which is ultimately key to understanding how our planet evolved to its current habitable state. Geochemists need to come up with new ways to decipher oxygen levels on the early Earth,″ Poulton said in the statement. Poulton was also one of the authors of the study.
