Outside the Francevillian lagoon, oceans still lacked phosphorus and carried little oxygen. Larger creatures would have struggled in those harsh surroundings.
These bubbles likely popped up and fizzled out a couple of times before overall conditions spread. Once they did it would have almost been like Star Wars, previously isolated “planets” with their own evolutionary past and possibly drastically different lengths of evolution before mixing.
Squids might be so weird because they were from a different pocket than everything else, it would explain why their DNA is so “alien”.
We see a lot of similar headlines from anthropology. One artifact overthrows the entire known timeline. I’m far from educated on these topics and maybe the articles are just sensationalizing it all, but these always rub me the wrong way. It seems like a very tiny number of data points to work with and whole fields of understanding flipping around a lot. Is this the best we can do?
Not a lot of data points remaining after a few million years.
No, this is Patrick.