Life on Earth exploded, but meteorites didn't start the party

A modern evolutionary myth may have been dispelled. Some 470 million years ago, a wealth of meteorites started falling to Earth, filling the sky with shooting stars. Around the same time, life on Earth erupted into an astonishing diversity of new critters, during the impressively titled Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event (GOBE). Some scientists connected these two instances, proposing that as space rocks plunged into the ocean, they somehow ignited an evolutionary eruption in Earth's seas