Evolution: The First Four Billion Years

Paleontology

and the History

of

Life

Michael Benton

And out of the ground the Lord

God

formed

every beast

of

the field, and

every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam

to see

what

he would

call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living

creature, that

was

the

name thereof.

Genesis 2:19

People have always

been

astounded

by the diversity of life, although perhaps

in

different

ways.

In

prescientific

times farmers saw how their crops and live-

stock

were merely part of a much larger richness of life, ar-rd people have al-

wrrys striven to understand the complexity and arrangement of living things.

From Aristotle to Linnaeus, scienrists atrempted to catalog life and to under-

stand where it had come from. During the eighteenth century it became clear

to all savants thar the earth had been populirted formerly by strange and mar-

velous

creatures that had since become ertinct. Bv 1820 some rough picture

of the succession of floras and faunas through geological time was beginning

to emerge. Charles Darwirr, during the voyage of HMS Beagle in the early

1830s, became increasingly convinced that life was more diverse than he had

imagined-every island he visited sported a new crop of plants and animals.

He saw the lateral

(geographic)

and vertical (historic) links between species

and realized by 1837 that species rvere all linked by a great tree. The tree con-

cept made it clear why species that in his time were geographically close

should also be genealogically close. Further, the tree conc€pt made it

clear

why the fossil mammals he found in Argentina
should be similar to the living

mammals of the region.

This essay addresses four concepts: what we know

about the sequence of

the history of life, how life has diversified

through time,

how

speciation oc-

curs, and how good (or bad) the fossil record is as a

source of data on the his-

tory of life. These were all issues

that concerned Darwin

(1859),

and they

concern us

still

today.

80

Narrative

There are many ways to re(

nren)'

fvpical examples,

Bentr

of l0 stages fronr

the

origin

l.The origin of life.The tt

fossil recorcl, some 3.6-

cells were probably like

but they lived in the irbs

2. Eukarycttes ttnd the oriS

nucleus, are reportecl frr

ar.rd hence presum:rbly a

of sexual reproduction.

eukar,votes,

possibly nol

mrrterial ancl reconrbina

3. Multicellularity. The hr:

billion-950 nrillion year

molecular

evidence that

some 1.2 billion

years

i1

dir ersify the functiorrs

r

4. Skcletons. Nlrny lnrma

skeletons

about 545 rnil

Phanerozclic, during thc

are known from many I

diversity of plrvla rcpret

skeletons u,ere accluired

skeletons clearly ofierec

groups to enter new lifc

5. Pretlation Perhaps link,

protective outer shells, r

predato rs, tnacrosco

1't

ic

strategies to feed on the

prey became a st:rndard

6. Bictlogical reefs. Reeis l

been made from a broa

polychaete u,orms in th

l.ate Cambrian and alg:

tabulate

corals in the O

groups of algae, sponge

through time, but reefs

scleractinian corals. Re,

rnrr

jor

physical geograp

habitats for

life.

7. Terrestrialization.

The t

huge arra,v

clf new life z