Eye-ing a better future on land

Richard Collins examines the possibilities for marine life should they evolve to leave the waters and come on land.

Around 440 million years ago, a fungus moved from the sea to the land. It was probably the first large living thing to do so. Life had been developing in the oceans for 3,000 million years by that time. Yet, marine animals remained relatively primitive.

Most still are today. Only the octopus, and its squid relatives, can challenge land-based animals intellectually; these invertebrate escapologists out-perform all other sea creatures at problem-solving. The other sophisticated ocean dwellers, the whales and dolphins, are ‘blow-ins’, air-breathers descended from land-based ancestors which took to seafaring 50 million years ago.