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.
Still, the search for intelligent life remains a reach. After all, life has flourished on Earth for about 3.5 billion years, and intelligent life (if we consider humans to be intelligent) has been around only for the last 200,000. For most of Earth's history, life consisted of primitive microbes.