Natural Science Forum / Biology / Paleontology / June 2004

A lot, just like now.  Nothing all that special that we know about,
but by the time you get that far back, readily analyzable rock
outcrops are fairly rare, so we are mainly looking at snapshots of a
few spots on the Earth's surface dating from tens of millions of years
apart.  They often aren't all that easy to date with a precieison of
better than plus or minus a couple of hundered million years.

Yes, there was life.  All single celled we think.  The earliest well
established multicelled animals that we know of are a bit less than
600 million years old.  There are a handful of credible objects that
that might be older fossils.

Start with the Wikipedia Geological Time Scale
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_timescale and click on all the
links that look applicable.  Some of the articles are yet to be
written, but many are there.  Be sure and read the article on
Proterozoic.  Extract some keywords to use for Google searches.  There
are many web sites with good paleontology sections that go back to the
proterozoic.  The  University of California at Berkely and University
of Wurzburg come to mind.  No, I don't have URLs handy, and it's
probably as easy for you to find them using Google or whatever as it
would be for me.