NEW DELHI: A “near-collapse” of the Earth’s magnetic field could have played a role in making biological life more complex and diverse more than 500 million years ago, a new international research has found.
Fossil records show that the earliest known complex multi-cellular animals, known as the Ediacaran fauna, significantly diversified in complexity and type between 575 and 565 million years ago.
Previous studies have linked this diversification to an increase in oxygen levels in the air and oceans that happened around the same time, although it was not clear why this increase occurred.
