Catastrophic Impacts Made Life on Earth Possible

(Before It's News)

Further studies suggest that meteorite impacts may have created the right environments for life to develop

How did life on Earth originally develop from random organic compounds into living, evolving cells? It may have relied on impacts by enormous meteorites and comets — the same sort of events that helped bring an end to the dinosaurs’ reign 65 million years ago… in fact, ancient impact craters might be precisely where life was able to develop on an otherwise hostile primordial Earth.

This is the hypothesis proposed by Sankar Chaterjee, Horn Professor of Geosciences and the curator of paleontology at the Museum of Texas Tech University.

“This is bigger than finding any dinosaur. This is what we’ve all searched for – the Holy Grail of science,” Chatterjee said.
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Read the rest of Catastrophic Impacts Made Life on Earth Possible (506 words)

© Jason Major for Universe Today, 2013. |
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Post tags: craters, DNA, Earth, life on Earth, Meteorites, origins of life, RNA, Texas Tech, viruses

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