Life as we know it wouldn’t be what is today without a lot of poop. In fact, Earth may have never hosted any life at all without experiencing a “fecal revolution” about 540 million years ago. This ancient excrement helps illustrate how and when animal life began to truly diversify on the planet. We can see this exponential growth in complex life inside the preserved poop prehistoric animals left behind. As the team explained, the poop responsible for modern ocean conditions is not much different from the poop on land—and the fertilizer used to grow everyone’s food.