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.
Earth is 4.6+ billion years old. It's seen a lot of birthday cake in those years, but it's really only seen eukaryotes for about the last 2 billion. When life first got started on Earth during the Precambrian Era, there were just a bunch of simplified prokaryotes at the birthday soirÃ©e, all without organelles.