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.
Complex multicellular forms of life are surprisingly recent on our planet. They have existed only for about 600,000,000 years or slightly more. When these creatures began to appear, 87% of the earth's existence had already gone by, and 83% of the total time life has existed had already passed as well.