Single Microbe May Have Triggered the "Great Dying" 171
An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from Medical Daily about a new theory for what triggered the
"Great Dying: " "Researchers believe that they may finally know why the event occurred, but the theory is not without controversy. There are several theories, including the possibility of a meteorite hitting the planet. Previously, most researchers believed that the Permian mass extinction was a result of a series of volcanic eruptions in what is now Siberia. ... However, Daniel Rothman from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is floating around a different theory. As he presented in a meeting for the American Geophysical Union, he believes that the mass extinction could have been caused by something much smaller. His theory is that the extinction was caused by a single strain of bacteria."
The kaboom (Score:5, Funny)
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But where's the Earth shattering kaboom? There's supposed to be an Earth shattering kaboom!
Then, due to the sheer amount of frustration at the lack of bacterial extinctions requiring massive detonations, Dexter's entire head exploded in aneurysm causing what can only be described as a minor "Earth Shattering kaboom!"
Here Lies Dexter Herbivore
"It's the little things that count."
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do you write for dinosaure comics ?
No, he's the artist.
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Volcanic eruptions that last millions of years could count as a kaboom.
Re:The kaboom (Score:4, Funny)
Obviously the Illudium Pu-36 Explosive Space Modulator was stolen by a rabbit.
"It obstructs my view of Venus"
--
BMO
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You know, I've seen it spelled "illudium" before, but I always assumed it was "Eludium", and element somewhat less rare then "Unobtanium".
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Chuck Jones called it Illudium.
But then again, he also called it Q-36 in his book "Chuck Amuck" instead of Pu-36 which is what wound up on the audio track.
--
BMO
Re:The kaboom (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's the smell! (Score:3)
Actually Agent Smith compared us to a virus, rather than a microbe
It's the smell!
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But where's the Earth shattering kaboom? There's supposed to be an Earth shattering kaboom!
No boom today, boom tomorrow (well on Friday)
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If there's no one there to hear it, does the kaboom make a noise?
A whole strain? (Score:1)
His theory is that the extinction was caused by a single strain of bacteria. [emphasis added]
Aw, that's not as much fun. The headline made me think that this guy somehow had it narrowed down to one actual organism.
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RTFA again: he did, her name's Andromeda...
Re:A whole strain? (Score:5, Funny)
> The headline made me think that this guy somehow had it narrowed down to one actual organism.
That is difficult to envision, Chuck Norris was born so much later.
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You're right. Chuck Norris doesn't evolve.
The implications for Darwinists are serious.
Re:A whole strain? (Score:5, Funny)
He doesn't need to - ecosystems adapt to him.
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>> Chuck Norris doesn't evolve.
> He doesn't need to - ecosystems adapt to him
Oh wait... then the problem arised in Soviet Russia!
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YOUR MOVE, ATHEISTS!
methane (Score:1)
Yeah, we produce a lot of methane here too.
I can see how it might kill off some species.
Put a cork in it, people!
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Despite the foul odor the folks around here mostly just expel hot air.
And it could also have been... (Score:2, Funny)
By reading the Wikipedia article, I have determined that it also may have been:
- A single rock
- A single volcano
- The build-up of a single type of gas
- The rising of a single body of water
- Lack of a single element in the water
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Lack of a single element in the not-water
FTFY
The Zombie Apocolypse did it! (Score:1)
Yes. A ridiculous theory. But about as plausible, after all it's just another virus...
Zombie dinosaurs chomped their way through the whole planet, then finally decomposed themselves over time. Only small mammals who could hide underground or birds that could fly away escaped those brain-lovin' undead dinos!
Ask the sharks; they saw the whole thing.
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I asked a shark, but he just told me to suck his dick.
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Zombie dinosaurs chomped their way through the whole planet, then finally decomposed themselves over time.
Um, this refers to the Permian Extinction. Therefore, it was caused by zombie frogs. Not nearly as awesome.
WARNING: theory requires homeopathic leanings (Score:2)
Volcanic eruptions in Siberia = entire planet dusted with nickel.
Eh, geologist comes up with geological theory. Funding running a bit low?
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the quantity of nickel required is "very small". It's a catalyst, not a consumable. When in ash, teh jet stream and ocean currenst are very good at distributing it. Completely plausible as a theory goes. Now, do we have proof? Not yet, however, this is better than many of the "look for money" theories.
Rings a bell (Score:1)
Mass extinction in a few thousand years and a single species responsible - I see a parallel. It isn't mass extinction exactly, but mankind has caused quite some disturbance in both land and sea ecosystems already. A few thousand years should be plenty enough to cause real mass extinction.
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Why would we wait that long?
Most of the critters are pretty useless to us already or will be so in the near future.
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Mass extinctions are fairly common throughout history - and we're chump change on the scale of such things.
For example, the Strait of Gibraltar is closing right now (on a geological scale - mere thousands of years), which will isolate the Med. This will cause the Med to evaporate in just a few centuries, leaving the most Hellish wastland imaginable temperatures in the basin will exeed the boiling point of water. That will in turn play merry Hell with all of Europe's climate, and likely worldwide climate.
Single microbe or single strain? (Score:2)
Which was it?
A comet!
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Seems a bit of a stretch; TFA's short, see below.. (Score:2)
Rothman analyzed a sample of sediment from the end of the Permian era that he obtained in China. From his analysis, he found that the rise in carbon levels was way too sharp to be caused by a geologic event like volcanic eruptions. He argues that instead, a microbe was behind this sudden rise.
Called methanosarcina, this sea-dwelling microbe is responsible for most of the methane produced biologically even today. Rothman and his team discovered that methanosarcina developed the ability to produce methane 231 million years ago. While that ability came around too late to be single-handedly responsible for the link.
Eh?
However, mathanosarcina requires nickel in order to produce methane quickly. Nickel levels spiked almost 251 million years ago, likely because of a spike in Siberian lava from the volcanoes themselves. This indicates that methanosarcina was directly responsible for producing the methane that killed off an overwhelming majority of the Earth's species.
Don't see where he proves the methane did it...
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Perhaps the nickel was present and widely distributed pre-methanosarcina explosion, and they 'ate' it all, so there's little left now.
It's not the size of the organism (Score:5, Funny)
H.G. Wells (Score:1)
Re:H.G. Wells (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll see your Wells and raise you a Watts:
"Let me tell you what happens if this thing gets out," she said quietly. "First off, nothing. We outnumber it, you see. At first we swamp it through sheer numbers, the models predict all sorts of skirmishes and false starts. But eventually it gets a foothold. Then it outcompetes conventional decomposers and monopolizes our inorganic nutrient base. That cuts the whole trophic pyramid off at the ankles. You, and me, and the viruses and the giant sequoias all just fade away for want of nitrates or some stupid thing. And welcome to the Age of Behemoth."
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This is perhaps the most profoundly stupid theory I have ever heard. It merits a special trophy in the creator's names. A subset of the darwin awards.
It wasn't a theory, it was fiction. The idea that earth microbes could infect a space alien with different evolution and possibly different chemistry is ludicrous, but far less so than the ideas that Klingons could mate with Earth people, or denizens in a galaxy far, far away would look anything like us. Or the idea that machines could think like Asimov's robo
Coincidence? (Score:1)
The Mayan calendar ends on December 21st, and drilling is due to resume into the Ellsworth sub-Antartic lake on the 21st?
http://www.ellsworth.org.uk/ [ellsworth.org.uk]
I for one welcome our tiny little waterborn underlords.
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Coincidence
Yes
Thanks for the oil! (Score:1)
He is mistaken (Score:4, Insightful)
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And methanosarcina are archaea [wikipedia.org], not bacteria, a fact that was three clicks away from the Wikipedia entry on methanosarcina [wikipedia.org], which is apparently too many clicks for Slashdot or Medical Daily (but New Scientist got it right). I suspect that what was actually presented at the meeting was a cogent hypothesis for how methanogens contributed to the Great Dying following an increase in bio-available nickel. What we get is the result after several application of the stupid filter that is the Internet.
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Wow, splitting hairs over synonyms that are used interchangeably in every day speech! Keep it up and one day you'll be a scientist at MIT too!
I was. And we knew the difference.
Cofactor F430 (Score:5, Interesting)
Cofactor F430 [wikipedia.org]
Forget the organism. This is about the advent of a novel reaction pathway, that scales on the availability of nickel. Surprisingly, geology might have something to say on that score. Any vigorous reaction pathway that bubbles madly away at an oceanic scale is almost certain to colour the infrared signature of our thin gas membrane. Imagine if everyone on the planet had an F430.
There's a lot to like about this hypothesis. I've seen worse. To determine exactly how this pathway becomes prolific at global scale would take decades of further study. It's as yet a humble beginning, of the kind that sometimes pans out.
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Imagine if everyone on the planet had an F430.
There would be no more speed bumps and Italy would have the highest GDP? Right? [wikipedia.org]
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That's a theory that costs a nickel
A New Low for Science "Journalism" (Score:2)
Setting aside the lack of detail and the characterization of an untested hypothesis as a theory, if you follow the link [livescience.com] in TFA about the dissenting opinions you'll find this gem:
Methane explosion
But just what caused that massive methane release remained a mystery. Daniel Rothman, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his colleagues wondered whether ocean-dwelling bacteria that churn out methane were the culprits.
His team found through genetic analysis that bacteria called methanosarcina evolved the ability to break down nickel and make methane as part of its metabolism about 251 million years ago. The bacteria may have exploded in population, thereby releasing the ocean's vast methane reserves. And because the bacteria add an oxygen molecule to methane during metabolism, an exponential rise in methanosarcina may have catastrophically depleted ocean oxygen levels.
So now bacteria are performing alchemy (converting Ni to CH4) and "adding an oxygen to methane" no longer produces methanol (CH3OH) or formaldehyde (CH2O), rather it is apparently just "methane with an added oxygen" which is apparently still a potent greenhouse gas.
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It is fairly clear that this is not alchemy. The nickel is acting as a catalyst.
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Read what they wrote: "methanosarcina evolved the ability to break down nickel and make methane." You can't break nickel down without doing nuclear chemistry--you can only change its oxidation state. It's clear to anyone with even a basic grasp of chemistry that methanogens use nickel enzyme complexes as catalysts, but the author of this ridiculous failure of journalism clearly thought that methanosarcina produce methane from nickel.
Civil War of the Worlds (Score:2)
Sounds a bit like H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, but involving just one planet.
No more medicaldaily.com articles, please (Score:4, Interesting)
PLEASE - let's not have any more articles from medicaldaily.com until they stop firing off 2 OR MORE auto-playing videos at the same time on every article.
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Your script blocking browser ad-on is broken. No ads here at all.
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These slipped past ad block pro. Usually I don't see them either. I'll have to look around.
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I had to explicitly tell NoScript that 33universal.com is untrusted.
That made the stupid auto-play video stop triggering.
auto-playing flash videos are the new ::blink:: tag
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These slipped past ad block pro. Usually I don't see them either.
Dinosaur Herpes (Score:2)
20 years later, no more dinosaurs.
This has happened twice ... could it happen again? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Of course it could happen. You said it yourself it has happened before. What kind of silly question is that?
It's called a rhetorical question [wikipedia.org]. It's a popular linguistic technique in some circles. ;-)
And I know where it came from! (Score:2)
Single Microbe May Have Triggered the "Great Dying"
It's the strain from Andromeda. Michael had it all figgered out.
vast amounts of methane in ocean shelf (Score:2)
These are also mentioned a potential problem for cl
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recent atmospheric methane not quite straight up (Score:2)
Jay Gould (Score:5, Insightful)
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effects on the Earth's ecosystems
Yes, global nuclear war wouldn't change anything.
Also, I'd say that thinking that the amount of biomass is a good indicator of evolution is probably a very USian thought.
Re:Jay Gould (again) (Score:5, Informative)
And thinking about the importance of a phylum in terms of its biomass is nothing to do with whether a biologist is American or not - it tells you the significance of that phylum in food chains. What does the AC above think the krill eat? They eat plankton. Now tell me, which is there more of? Krill or plankton? And what do plankton do? They use sunlight and nutrients (largely recycled by bacteria from decaying matter), or they use bacteria directly.
How does organic matter in the soil get broken down into a form that plants can use? Fungi and bacteria. Without plants, there would be only a few people living on the sea coasts.
Read Jay Gould. Then read some of the many books he recommends. You will then be able to make more intelligent posts on these subjects.
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No. No, it doesn't. We have the ability to create a global extinction event at any time. It is absolutely ridiculous to imply that bacteria have more potential drastic effects on the ecosystems on Earth than humans. That we choose not to wield the vast array of means we have to do so, does not equate to the idea that those means do not exist.
Continuing, I was and am very well aware that total biomass can indicate the significance of a species to the ecosystem as a whole (but made an apparently failed attemp
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelagibacter_ubique [wikipedia.org]
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Yeah, confined to the ocean and only in temperate surface waters. We can take 'em ;-)
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Jay Gould is not a supporter of traditional evolution theory. He supports the punctuated equilibrium based upon evidence in the fossil record. The basic idea is that animals do not gradually adapt to an environement. Instead, some mutant freak for some reason becomes dominant in an area. This is often because of a radical change in that environment. Richard Dawkins highly opposes these views: despite the significant evidence Gould produced, it cannot prove that traditional evolution did not occur for the sa
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I see no reason why both theories couldn't be correct, just under different circumstances. The traditional theory where some mutations are benign or helpful, spurring reproduction, and the far more numerous mutations which will kill the organism or make it hard for it to reproduce.
Then an asteroid hits or the earth rapidly warms/cools or some other catastrophe, most species die but a few species that may well have been on the brink of extinction finds its new environment friendly and thrives, while mutation
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Also, I'd say that thinking that the amount of biomass is a good indicator of evolution is probably a very USian thought.
Why would you assume that someone is from the United States of Brazil based on that statement? Or did you mean the United States of America? Please pay attention to common world-wide convention and just refer to them as either "Brazil" or "America" respectively, so as to avoid confusion. Also, saying "USian" makes you sound like you're some kind of idiot with an axe to grind. Just FYI.
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Common worldwide convention has The United States of America as the only current user of "United States" with the exception of maybe Mexico:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_(disambiguation) [wikipedia.org]
Sometimes people in The U.S.A. don't like to say American, because they think it's arrogant. I mean, one entire hemisphere is labeled America, between North and South.
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>But in fact, in terms of biomass and effects on the Earth's ecosystems, we are still living in the Age of Bacteria.
No, we live in Hollywood era.
Re:Jay Gould (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Jay Gould (Score:5, Funny)
It's the ultimate measure of biomass.
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What is your objection to his statement? You said "in terms of biomass," and he lists the species with the highest total biomass. In what possible way does that indicate he failed to understand? I guess fail to understand you as well.
Re:Jay Gould (Score:4, Funny)
Re:It's very poor science in one way... (Score:4, Insightful)
Nowadays you HAVE to incorporate gas-influenced Climate Change into EVERYTHING you produce.Otherwise you risk losing your grant to a malleable researcher.
Yeah right because the 100+ nations that fund the IPCC all have exactly the same political agenda and every mainstream scientist, science journal and scientific institute on the planet has been bought of by an international system of grants that doesn't actually exist. Do you realize how fucking crazy paranoid you have to be to believe that, it's the same anti-science shit you hear from creationists, anti-vax'ers, and other groups of whacko's who don't like specific aspects of the natural world and choose to walk around with their head up their arse. Geology is the only tool we have to investigate past climate, get a grip on your paranoid delusions and go read a climate science text book, particularly the chapters on paleo-climatology.
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Yes, evidence that backs up your idea is a good way to get a science grant, science grants have a proven track record of increasing our knowledge of the world around us.
Nowadays you HAVE to incorporate gas-influenced Climate Change into EVERYTHING you produce.Otherwise you risk losing your grant to a malleable researcher.
Yeah right because the 100+ nations that fund the IPCC all have exactly the same political agenda and every mainstream scientist, science journal and scientific institute on the planet has been bought of by an international system of grants that doesn't actually exist. Do you realize how fucking crazy paranoid you have to be to believe that, it's the same anti-science shit you hear from creationists, anti-vax'ers, and other groups of whacko's who don't like specific aspects of the natural world and choose to walk around with their head up their arse. Geology is the only tool we have to investigate past climate, get a grip on your paranoid delusions and go read a climate science text book, particularly the chapters on paleo-climatology.
Kinda like creationists claiming that you can't trust biologists because they're all in on an atheistic conspiracy to discredit religion.
The foundation of science denialism is disqualifying the actual experts from having an opinion on the topic.
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> Nowadays you HAVE to incorporate gas-influenced Climate Change into EVERYTHING you produce.Otherwise you risk losing your grant to a malleable researcher.
The vast majority of scientific funding in the US and Canada goes to people who are not working on climate change, or anything related to climate change.
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And the climate change denialists have...Christopher Walter Monckton.
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ice cores, dendrochronology, carbon dating, isotopic ratios, and other things
Yep, lots of different kinds of evidence. And all of those tests are done from things that happen to be dug out of the earth...
I guess you could find evidence of previous climates from the genetics or geographical distribution of extant populations, but I can't think of any widely used evidence of previous climates that doesn't have 'geo-' somewhere in the title of its field.
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in science all theories are supposed to have a null value for validity until proven valid/invalid.
in pure science if a scientist presents a conflicting point of view or theory, based on whatever evidence, it should be investigated to determine its validity.
the guy was refering to the fact that anyone who thinks they have a counter argument to climate change has much trouble getting funding and get shutdown, without any determination of validity, because climate change has very much become a politicized topi
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addendum: and if you dont think there's politics (not red/blue, but ass kissing, researching whats "hip/popular", etc) involved in getting funding for research, you're horribly deluded.
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Doesn't really help. You see round these here parts we generally build our windmills outside.
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*sigh*
Quite complaining & get nerding.
As repeated many, many times here, install Adblock, Noscript...
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AdBlock + NoScript
Never an auto-play advertisement be seen.
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Video ads = evil
Unintrusive, relavent and optimised ads = a good way to generate revenue and maybe even learn about a useful product from time to time.
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Come on, how is this informative?!? Either Troll or Funny, I don't care, but this smells of a moderator trolling or trying to be funny!
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But then again, we have no idea..
Options are: 1) METEOR!!! - hit the earth, causing huge cataclysmic weather effects. 2) ICE AGE!!! - cooled everything down to horribly low temperatures in a flash (few hundred or thousands ofyears). 3) GENETIC MUTATION IN BACTERIA!!! - rare killer viruses killed everything accidentally. 4) GENETIC MUTATION IN VEGETATION!!! - plants discovered a new way to be less nutritious and fend off the herding-hordes
Any hypothesis will have to come up with reasons why small dinosaurs, small mammals, and lizards, lots and lots of lizards survived, and not the bigger dinosaurs, that's why I think ice age or mutation in vegetation are the likeliest options.
You seem to be confusing The Great Dying [wikipedia.org] (the extinction event at the P-Tr boundary which killed 83% of all genera on the planet) and the K-T extinction event [wikipedia.org], which killed the dinosaurs and various other creatures and plants.
The consensus on the latter is that the extinction was caused primarily by the impact that created the Chicxulub crater [wikipedia.org], possibly with additional impacts and increased volcanic activity playing a further role.
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Since when have archaea been bacteria?
Well, for several centuries, in the understanding of the general public. The verification that they're very different sorts of critters dates back only a few decades. The proposed splitting of bacteria and archaea orginated in the 1970s, and it became fully accepted by biologists during the 1990s.
Thus, the media and the general population have had only 20 to 30 years to adapt to this new classification, and that's not nearly enough time. They also keep talking about the extinction of the dinosaurs, se