University of Wisconsin Geoscience Postdoc: Bury Carbon, Get Animals

Jon Husson, a geoscience postdoc at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, sits by an outcrop of black shale in Nova Scotia, where he gets a bright idea. His insight, according to an announcement from UWM:

For the development of animals, nothing -- with the exception of DNA -- may be more important than oxygen in the atmosphere.

Oxygen enables the chemical reactions that animals use to get energy from stored carbohydrates -- from food. So it may be no coincidence that animals appeared and evol...