The history of the Earth is long.  You always knew there had to be boring stretches here and there.  But still it's funny that there's a billion-year time period called the Boring Billion.

Imagine you're a paleontologist and someone asks you what you're working on.  "The Boring Billion".   🥱 

But it's actually interesting that from 1.8 billion to 0.8 billion years ago the oceans may have been black- and milky-turquoise - full of purple bacteria that photosynthesize but produce sulfur instead of oxygen.

And maybe this is when modern cells - eukaryotes - first arose, and developed into multicellular organisms, and diversified into plants, animals, and fungi!  That would be the very opposite of boring.  But we have no direct fossil record of this, so we can only theorize.

Before the Boring Billion came the Oxygen Catastrophe, when oxygen created by photosynthesis increased to the point of threatening all existing life.  That could be why eukaryotes developed.  The atmosphere used to have a lot of methane in it - a powerful greenhouse gas - but the oxygen reacted with that, plunging the world into massive ice ages.

But eventually these subsided, and the Boring Billion began.

They ended with an even more extreme bout of ice ages: the Cryogenian.   Scientists are still arguing about whether the whole earth froze over ("Snowball Earth"), or whether there were some liquid oceans left near the equator ("Slushball Earth").

So, as with human history, it seems paleontology naturally focuses on crises and tend to skims over the "boring" periods when good things are slowly developing.

For more, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boring_Billion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryogenian

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