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'Snowball Earth' Evolution Hypothesis Gains New Momentum

The University of Colorado Boulder's magazine recently wrote: What happened during the "Snowball Earth" period is perplexing: Just as the planet endured about 100 million years of deep freeze, with a thick layer of ice covering most of Earth and with low levels of atmospheric oxygen, forms of multic...

But fossil records from 720 to 635 million years ago show an evolutionary spurt preceding the development of animals... Carl Simpson, a macroevolutionary paleobiologist at CU Boulder, has found evidence that cold seawater could have jump-started — rather than suppressed — evolution from single-celled to multicellular life forms. Imagine swimming through honey rather than water... To test the idea, Simpson, a paleobiologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his team conducted an experiment designed to see what a modern single-celled organism does when confronted with higher viscosity... Simpson and colleagues have now received a $1 million grant to study grains of sand made from calcium carbonate and called ooids, since their diameter "could be a proxy measurement of Earth's temperature for the last 2.5 billion years," according to the university's article.

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