Deep Time Archives
The pre-human Earth told through the rock: diagram first, photographic archive second.
Oman's Sponge Molecule Survived. Its Date Did Not.
Two and a half kilometres under the desert of Oman, a mudstone from before the end of the last global ice age held a molecule announced in 2009 as the oldest trace of animal life. ...
Dickinsonia Was Named an Animal by a Molecule
Dickinsonia has no mouth, no gut, and no limb anyone has ever found — and for a hundred and fifty years, nobody could agree what kingdom it belonged to. In 2018 a molecule settled ...
The Doushantuo Embryos Never Grew Up Into Animals
In the Weng'an phosphorite of South China, balls of cells less than half a millimetre across, split into two, four and eight, were published in 1998 as the oldest animal embryos. I...
Mistaken Point's Fossils Lived Below the Sunlight
At Mistaken Point, Newfoundland, more than a hundred rock surfaces hold what the latest dating paper calls the oldest architecturally complex macrofossils, buried under thin layers...
The Cambrian Golden Spike Sits Four Metres Above Its Own Fossil
The Cambrian — and the whole eon we live in — officially begins at one point in a sea cliff in Newfoundland, at the first appearance of a single burrow. In 1999 the same burrow was...
The Cambrian Explosion Did Not Wait for the Sea
A famous idea says the Cambrian explosion was switched on by a flood: seas pouring over a continent planed down to bare rock, loading the ocean with the chemistry that built the fi...
The Great Unconformity Was Not One Global Event
In the Grand Canyon there is a single surface you can put your hand on where 1.75-billion-year-old rock touches 505-million-year-old rock directly, with nothing in between. The tex...
The Hadean Was Not Hell, and One Zircon Grain Says So
The oldest thing on Earth is a grain of zircon from a low ridge in Western Australia, older than every rock on this planet. The headline attached to it says the eon we named after ...
Siberian Traps Erupted for 300,000 Years and Nothing Died
The worst extinction in Earth's record is dated to at most sixty thousand years, by uranium clocks inside crystals in five thin ash beds at a quarry in eastern China. The usual exp...
The Fern That Did Not Cool a Planet Alone
A drill core taken 250 kilometres from the North Pole has a four-metre band that is almost solid fossil fern spore. The popular version says this one species single-handedly flippe...
The Fish Was Still Breathing When the Impact Reached It
In a fossil site in North Dakota, there is a fish with a bead of impact glass lodged in its gills, not swallowed after death, but caught in the exact structure it used to breathe. ...
Coal Did Not Wait Sixty Million Years for Fungi to Show Up
There is a black band of coal running through a cliff in Nova Scotia, with fossil tree trunks still standing above it in growth position. The usual story says that band exists beca...
Earth Froze to the Equator, and the Freeze Wrote Its Own Escape
On a hillside in northern Namibia you can put one hand on each of two rocks. Below: unsorted glacial rubble, with stones dropped out of floating ice. Above: pale dolostone, a chemi...
The Air You Breathe Was a Planetary Contamination Event
Everyone points at banded iron formation as the proof that Earth's atmosphere filled with oxygen. It is not the proof. Banded iron was forming for hundreds of millions of years bef...
The Mediterranean Was a Desert Two Kilometres Below Sea Level
In 1970 a drilling ship in the middle of the Mediterranean pulled up rock salt from under three kilometres of water. Rock salt only forms when seawater evaporates away. The sea you...