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The history of life on Earth is still a mystery: Bacteria have been around for about 3 billion years, but for most of this time they had had the Earth to themselves. Seaweed, jellyfish-like creatures, sponges and worms arrived a few million years before the Cambrian period began, over 500 million years ago.

But 200 million years ago, higher forms of life suddenly arrived: arthropods, brachiopods, coelenterates, echinoderms, mollusks and even chordates, the animal group from which vertebrates like us developed. Each of these evolutionary changes can be coordinated with a period in which the amount of oxygen in the ocean rose. Each of these oxidation events corresponds with an increase in the size, complexity and diversity of life, both plant and animal.
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No, we don’t just mean that we all have some nasty folks in our family tree–We’re talking about an actual rat-like mammal that is the common ancestor of all humans. It weighed about half a pound, had a long furry tail and ate insects (something WE may do more of in the future).

This ancestor emerged within 200,000 to 400,000 years after the dinosaurs died off. However, it took millions of years before the first members of this modern mammal appeared in great numbers. A research team used a combination of fossil evidence and genetic data encoded in DNA to determine the ancestor’s status.
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