99). Because of the water pressure the high temperature was not as dangerous to the animal life as it would have been on the surface. Many of the hydrothermal vent animals consist of entire groupings of animals that only exist at the vents. The fauna is endemic at high taxonomic levels, including a class, an order, five super-families, eight families, and numerous genera. The distinctiveness shows a period of long evolution and many show origins from the Mesozoic or earlier. It has been determined that these creatures are living off of microbes that come from the interior of the earth. These microbes convert carbon dioxide, water, and nitrate into a usable organic food source in much the same way a plant uses photosynthesis to convert elements into its food source (Humphris 1995). The creatures acquire their oxygen source from iron oxides and sulfates, which consist of weakly bound oxygen and other elements (Gold 1999). Many scientists now believe that life could have developed around these vents where photosynthesis does not supply the energy source. On the bottom of the ocean the first organisms would have been protected from extreme radiation from the sun and space and would have survived any organism sterilizing events such as crashing meteorites. In order for life to have begun certain elements would have to have been present in the environment. These elements are believed to have been present on the surface of the early earth and now are equally believed to be present at the hydrothermal vent sites in some form. These elements include carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus (Fox 1972). These basic elements and others plus the intense heat from the lithosphere discharge would have been sufficient to create the chemical reactions necessary to form the first amino acid which in time became the first proto-cell which in time became the first cell and so forth. How exactly this happened is yet unknown and will never ...
