Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. About 445 million years ago, our planet completely changed. Massive glaciers formed over the supercontinent Gondwana, sucking up sea water like an icy sponge. Now called the Late Ordovician mass extinction (LOME), Earth’s first major mass extinction wiped out about 85 percent of all marine species as the ocean chemistry radically changed and Earth’s climate turned bitter cold.  However, with great biological havoc also comes opportunity. During all of this upheaval, one group evolved to dominate all others—jawed vertebrates. This ultimately put life on a forward path that can be traced up to today, according to a study published today in the journal Science Advances. “We have demonstrated that jawed fishes only became dominant because this event happened,” Lauren Sallan, a study co-author and evolutionary biologist at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, said in a statement. “And fundamentally, we have nuanced our understanding of evolution by drawing a line between the fossil record, ecology, and biogeography.” Earth’s first …