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Emergence and Evolution of Early Life in the Geological Environment

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The Cnidaria, Past, Present and Future

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Abstract

Based on our current assumptions, life on Earth started long before 3.5 billion years ago, the age of the oldest (accepted) terrestrial fossils. The issue on how life emerged from a non-living world, however, is still waiting for a solution. Aside from the many ideas generated by theoretical speculations, however, the issue on origin and evolution of the primordial life can be addressed through some of the oldest environmental conditions still preserved on the terrestrial sedimentary record (and their alleged modern analogues), and other planetary bodies, especially Mars, where rovers, orbiters and spectrometers can deal with unaltered rocks much older than the oldest one preserved on our planet and, perhaps, finally able to reveal some evidence of life.

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Acknowledgements

We very much appreciated the invitation to this publication by the Editors. This work is a contribution to the FP7-PEOPLE-2013-CIG/INACMa, and to the Trans Domain European COST Action Life-ORIGINS (TD1308). We thank André Brack for comments that greatly improved the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biological, Geological and Environmental Sciences, Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna, Via Zamboni 67, 40126, Bologna, Italy

    Barbara Cavalazzi & Roberto Barbieri

  2. Department of Geology, University of Johannesburg, 524, Auckland Park 2006, Johannesburg, South Africa

    Barbara Cavalazzi

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  1. Barbara Cavalazzi
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  2. Roberto Barbieri
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Correspondence to Barbara Cavalazzi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Biological, Geological and Env Scie, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Stefano Goffredo

  2. Fac. Life Sciences, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel

    Zvy Dubinsky

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Cavalazzi, B., Barbieri, R. (2016). Emergence and Evolution of Early Life in the Geological Environment. In: Goffredo, S., Dubinsky, Z. (eds) The Cnidaria, Past, Present and Future. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31305-4_1

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