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.
This is the story of the birth of life on Earth. Life is old. The dinosaurs are perhaps the most famous extinct creatures, and they had their beginnings 250 million years ago. But life dates back much further. The oldest known fossils are around 3.5 billion years old, 14 times the age of the oldest dinosaurs.