New podcast asks how life on earth got to be so big

 

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Delegates from 190 nations converged on Copenhagen this December to address the issue of global warming. As world leaders met to forestall climate change in the future, a NESCent working group looked at how changes in the earth's climate have shaped life in the past. Their question: How and why have earth's creatures evolved to be so big from their tiny beginnings? Life has experienced two big growth spurts over evolutionary time, they explain. Both leaps coincided with periods when there was a dramatic increase in atmospheric oxygen.

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