[c]Colorful bacteria in Yellowstone's Grand Prismatic Spring.
Photo: Charles O'Rear/Corbis[/c]
A geobiologist at the University of Lund near my hometown of Malmö has just published a paper where she claims that it was a mutation that allowed organisms to tolerate and make use of oxygen that sparked the Cambrian explosion. In her opinion, if that mutation had happened earlier, large animals would have existed at an earlier era. Photo: Charles O'Rear/Corbis[/c]
Conversely, if that mutation hadn't happened, we would all still have been bacteria.
Ann