Expert says Namibia is the best place to envisage what Earth looked like 545 million years ago
The Namibia Scientific Society will host a public talk: ‘From Biotic Weirdness to the Modern World- Namibia 545 Million Years Ago’, by Prof Patricia Vickers-Rich, Director of the Monash Science Centre, Monash University in Australia, on 3 July at 19:30.
The Society in a statement said that Vickers-Rich will discuss how in the beginning of that time weird organisms, some of them large, dominated the landscape and how Earth began to solidify and divide into its layers, the core, mantle and crust, more than 4 billion years ago and finally to develop a solid surface, which is unlike Jupiter and Saturn, but more like Mars.
She will explain how it was not until about 3.8 billion years ago that life is first recorded on Earth by structures called stromatolites, constructed, by bacteria and then by 530 million years ago it was a change from a Weird World to the Modern, which makes Namibia one of the best places on Earth today to envision what happened.
Vickers-Rich who is a world renowned paleontologist and geologist, researches the origins and evolution of Australasian vertebrates and their environments over the past 400 million years and she has a special interest in Australian avian fossil non-passerines.
She is also a Research Associate at Tasmania’s Queen Victoria Museum, the Museum of Victoria and Moscow’s Paleontological Institute.
