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Krishna Sunder's avatar

You almost had me there… please do more!

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Seth's avatar

Fascinating! But I find it hard to believe that microbes, having had countless millennia to hone their craft, would leave giant piles of free food lying around until only a few thousand years ago.

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Abhishaike Mahajan's avatar

I appreciate the skepticism. But strange things have been known to happen! For instance, for about 60 million years during the Carboniferous, trees couldn't rot, as lignin-digesting fungi hadn't evolved yet, so forests just piled up, slowly compressing down underneath the earth. And that's where coal comes from!

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