The Gulf of Mexico basin was created by an episode of crustal extension and sea-floor spreading during the Mesozoic breakup of Pangea (Salvador, 1987; Sawyer et al., 1991; Buffler and Thomas, 1994; Harry and Londono, 2004; Jacques and Clegg, 2002).
Title: Life Before Earth. Abstract: An extrapolation of the genetic complexity of organisms to earlier times suggests that life began before the Earth was formed. Life may have started from systems with single heritable elements that are functionally equivalent to a nucleotide.
Life always finds a way. We see it on Earth that most places on this planet have life, in the deep dark oxygen-deprived ocean trenches to hot acidic springs in the Yellowstone Park to the driest desert. There could be life on Mars that either originated there or here by hitchhiking on space rocks. We might even be Martians ourselves.