The other Big Bang
In the fourth of our series of articles on scientific mysteries we ask why, a mere 542m years ago, animal life suddenly took off
IN THE 1800s, when early geologists started to work out the order in which things had happened in Earth’s history, they quickly assembled a rough chronology. Though their successors had to wait until the invention of radio-isotopic dating, a century or more later, to find out how old the rocks these pioneers were looking at actually were, 19th-century geologists were able to discover those rocks’ ages relative to one other.
This article appeared in the Schools brief section of the print edition under the headline “The other Big Bang”
Schools brief August 29th 2015
From the August 29th 2015 edition
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