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Contents:
Paper 58 - "Life Establishment on Urantia"
Paper 59- "The Marine Life Era on Urantia" |
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1.
Archeozoic
(pre-life era) extends over the initial 450,000,000 years. |
600,000,000 years ago
Life Carriers arrived on Urantia to study the physical conditions
preparatory to launching life. Having projected a sodium chloride
pattern of life that can only function in a suitable salt solution,
life could not be planted until the ocean waters had become
sufficiently briny.
550,000,000 years ago
the Life Carrier corps returned to
Urantia.
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Ideal
conditions for marine-origin life implantation are provided by
a large number of inland seas, by an extensive shore line of
shallow waters and sheltered bays. These ancient inland seas
were seldom over five or six hundred feet deep, and sunlight
can penetrate ocean water for more than
six hundred feet. |
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2.
Proterozoic [life-dawn] era
extends over the next 150,000,000 years |
In co-operation with spiritual
powers and superphysical forces we organized and initiated the
original life patterns of this world . . .
. . . and planted them in the hospitable
waters of the realm, in three original, identical, and simultaneous
marine-life implantations: the central or Eurasian-African, the
eastern or Australasian, and the western, embracing Greenland and
the Americas.
Saskia Raevouri's version of Pangaea
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For a
similar but different concept of Pangaea (the original
continent), click here for
Kathy Williamson's version.
Email
Kathy
for feedback. |
Salt water
stimulated the first protoplasmic reactions of the first living
cells to function on the planet.
500,000,000 years ago primitive marine vegetable life was well established.
Plant cell |
Oldest-known plants |
One-celled plant |
The
bacteria [are] simple vegetable organisms
of a very primitive nature [732] |
round bacteria |
rod-shaped bacteria |
spiral bacteria |
Soon after, the
continents began to drift apart. Greenland, the arctic land mass, with
North and South America, drifting west. Africa split from Europe and
Asia creating the Mediterranean basin. Antarctica, Australia, and the
land indicated by the Pacific islands drifted south and east.
| "Our
purpose in making three marine-life implantations was to insure
that each great land mass would carry this life with it, in its
warm-water seas, as the land subsequently separated. We foresaw
that in the later era of the emergence of land life large oceans
of water would separate these drifting continental land
masses." - The Life Carriers. |
The outer one thousand miles
of the earth’s mass consists principally of different kinds of rock.
Underneath are the denser and heavier metallic elements, such as iron.
The lava layers of the earth’s crust, when
cooled, form granite. Sea bottoms consist largely
of basalt, a form of lava considerably heavier than the granite of
the land masses, which are then enabled to "float."
iron |
iron |
rock |
granite |
basalt |
basalt |
450,000,000 years
ago the transition from vegetable to animal life occurred, a gradual
development inherent in the original life patterns.
One surviving
example is the slime molds, which can hardly be classified as either plant
or animal.
 
slime molds
Fossils
from this life-dawn or Proterozoic era will yield the remains of
vegetable and early primitive animal life, algae, corallike
plants, primitive Protozoa, and spongelike transition organisms.
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blue-green algae
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primitive protozoa
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In those days the
extensive shoreline waters of the various land masses and the many
inland seas swarmed with the simple forms of primitive animal marine
life, mostly without shells, which had developed from preceding
vegetable organisms, while the bottoms of the shallow and extensive
inland seas were being gradually overrun by a profuse and luxuriant
growth of vegetation.
 |
 |
| luxuriant
sea vegetation |
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There are
no "missing links." From era to era radically new species
of animal life appear full-fledged and suddenly, not as a result of
gradual accumulation of small variations. These genetic mutations
are wholly biologic, strictly natural, and there is nothing
supernatural connected to them. According to the degree of the ocean’s
saltiness, animals evolved ingenious techniques to either increase
or decrease the saltiness of their body fluids, thus enabling some
to live in fresh water. Plants and animals never cease to make these
adjustment experiments, and study of the rock-embraced fossils of
marine life reveals the early struggles of these primitive
organisms.
The
physical make-up of all new orders of life are governed by physical
laws, but the subsequent endowment of mind is a bestowal of the
adjutant mind-spirits in accordance with innate brain capacity,
which in turn is wholly dependent on the brain capacity afforded by
purely physical and evolutionary developments.
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This stone
layer, the oldest fossil-bearing stratum in the crust of the earth,
has been crumpled, folded, and grotesquely twisted as a result of
the upheavals of earthquakes and the early volcanoes. The lava flows
of this age brought much iron, copper, and lead up near the
planetary surface.
During
these times of primitive marine life, extensive areas of the
continental shores sank beneath the seas from a few feet to half a
mile. Much of the older sandstone and conglomerates
represents the sedimentary accumulations of these ancient shores.
The sedimentary rocks belonging to this early stratification rest
directly upon those layers which date back far beyond the origin of
life, back to the early appearance of the world-wide ocean.
Some of the
upper layers of these transition rock deposits contain small amounts
of shale or slate of dark colors, indicating the
presence of organic carbon and testifying to the existence of the
ancestors of those forms of plant life which overran the earth
during the succeeding Carboniferous or coal age.
Much of the
copper in these rock layers results from water deposition.
Some is found in the cracks of the older rocks and is the
concentrate of the sluggish swamp water of some ancient sheltered
shore line. The iron mines of North America and Europe are located
in deposits and extrusions lying partly in the older unstratified
rocks and partly in these later stratified rocks of the transition
periods of life formation.
The continent of North
America is rich in the fossil-bearing deposits of the entire
marine-life era. The very first and oldest layers are separated from
the later strata of the preceding period by extensive erosion
deposits which clearly segregate these two stages of planetary
development.
Next:
Paper 59- "The Marine Life Era on Urantia"
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