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Researchers believe that the absence of oxygen catalyzed the emergence of Earth's first multicellular organisms hundreds of millions of years ago.Get a daily digest of the latest news in tech, science, and technology, delivered right to your mailbox. Subscribe now.
Instead, researchers have found that it may have been the absence of high oxygen that led to the development of multicellular organisms.This colourless, odorless, and tasteless gas is the most abundant element by mass in the Earth's crust, and the, it started to build up during the Great Oxygenation Event around 2.33 billion years ago. This was when cyanobacteria living in the oceans began producing oxygen through photosynthesis.
By analyzing thallium isotopes discovered in the mountains, the research team was able to calculate the oxygen levels existing in the oceans of the past. "When we looked at these fossils in Oman, in particular this rare element called thallium, and in the isotopes that thallium has, and when we analyzed them we saw that the results reflected long-term anoxic conditions in the deep ocean at the time," the expert says.
Bjerrum says the team's nearly 10-year-long research stands in contrast to the previous assumptions that the diversification of multicellular organisms was prompted by the rise of oxygen. "If we didn't have the 'stemness' in our bone marrow then we would run out of core cells for regenerating our red blood cells," he continues. "So too much oxygen results in the differentiation of cells early on and no cells that could be regenerated later on."
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