ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Earth's oxygen cycle and the evolution of animal life.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 51 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
51 citing papers in PubMed.
- Stagewise oxygenation of the Earth's atmosphere and oceans.Innovation (Cambridge (Mass.)) · 2026Review
- Slowing planetary rotation influences ocean nutrient cycling and oxygenation.Science advances · 2026Article
- Exo-Geoscience Perspectives Beyond Habitability.Space science reviews · 2026Review
- Onset of persistent surface ocean oxygenation during the Great Oxidation Event.Nature communications · 2025Article
- An expansive global oxygenation of Earth's surface environments 1.4 billion years ago.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Eukaryotes expansion into non-marine habitats prohibited by nitrogen limitation during the mid-Proterozoic.iScience · 2025Article
- Benthic diel oxygen variability and stress as potential drivers for animal diversification in the Neoproterozoic-Palaeozoic.Nature communications · 2025Article
- A shallow-water oxygen minimum zone in an oligotrophic Tonian basin.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Respiratory processes of early-evolved hyperthermophiles in sulfidic and low-oxygen geothermal microbial communities.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Ediacaran origin and Ediacaran-Cambrian diversification of Metazoa.Science advances · 2024Article
- Constraining the oxygen requirements for modern microbial eukaryote diversity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Phylotranscriptomics unveil a Paleoproterozoic-Mesoproterozoic origin and deep relationships of the Viridiplantae.Nature communications · 2023Article
- The neuroprotective effects of oxygen therapy in Alzheimer's disease: a narrative review.Neural regeneration research · 2023Review
- Diagenetic nutrient supplies to the Proterozoic biosphere archived in divergent nitrogen isotopic ratios between kerogen and silicate minerals.Geobiology · 2022Article
- Searching for Life, Mindful of Lyfe's Possibilities.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Eukaryogenesis and oxygen in Earth history.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Review
- Strong evidence for a weakly oxygenated ocean-atmosphere system during the Proterozoic.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Thriving in Oxygen While Preventing ROS Overproduction: No Two Systems Are Created Equal.Frontiers in physiology · 2022Review
- Article
- Decreasing Phanerozoic extinction intensity as a consequence of Earth surface oxygenation and metazoan ecophysiology.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The emergence and expansion of complex eukaryotic life on Earth is linked at a basic level to the secular evolution of surface oxygen levels. However, the role that planetary redox evolution has played in controlling the timing of metazoan (animal) emergence and diversification, if any, has been intensely debated. Discussion has gravitated toward threshold levels of environmental free oxygen (O2) necessary for early evolving animals to survive under controlled conditions. However, defining such thresholds in practice is not straightforward, and environmental O2 levels can potentially constrain animal life in ways distinct from threshold O2 tolerance. Herein, we quantitatively explore one aspect of the evolutionary coupling between animal life and Earth's oxygen cycle-the influence of spatial and temporal variability in surface ocean O2 levels on the ecology of early metazoan organisms. Through the application of a series of quantitative biogeochemical models, we find that large spatiotemporal variations in surface ocean O2 levels and pervasive benthic anoxia are expected in a world with much lower atmospheric pO2 than at present, resulting in severe ecological constraints and a challenging evolutionary landscape for early metazoan life. We argue that these effects, when considered in the light of synergistic interactions with other environmental parameters and variable O2 demand throughout an organism's life history, would have resulted in long-term evolutionary and ecological inhibition of animal life on Earth for much of Middle Proterozoic time (∼1.8-0.8 billion years ago).
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