Transcript: Life on Earth originated in water, and it grew to multicelled complexity in the oceans. Small organisms, however, could have found plenty of niches on land to survive, in ponds or in small pools of water. It’s likely that algae did this over half a billion years ago. Larger organisms must have taken longer to reach the land because they needed a way of gathering nutrients from the soil and the air rather just from water. Plants and fungi were probably the first to make the leap to land, facilitated the by the rise in oxygen and the ozone layer which would have protected organisms on land from cellular damage. Four hundred and fifty million years ago, perhaps four hundred and eighty million years ago, the first plants reached the land. Animals followed about four hundred million years ago. The first animals on land were of course amphibians, able to survive both a liquid and a dry environment. By three hundred and fifty million years ago, the Carboniferous era, vast forests filled with insects populated the land mass, and of course over this period the deposition of organisms in layers of sediment lead to the deposition of coal and oil that fueled our industrial revolution.