He's tall and thin, I'm short and wide. He has strikingly white hair, mine is strongly dark. But our noses are similar.

I think we can safely say we have distant German ancestors, but that's about it.

As for the science - I learned a lot. The "Snowball Earth" is a certainty, but we're not sure what it was like. In any one location we see 1, 2, 3 or more glaciations. Some have a "carbonate cap" and some don't. Some researchers use the presence of a carbonate cap as a correlation tool (in the absence of precise dating), but we saw evidence today for different dates in some areas, and for processes that would automatically mimic the carbonate cap AND it's crazy isotopic signature in different local areas at different times (each a widespread deglaciation, but each a local carbonate). I think the evidence is pointing to a multiple cyclic period, rather than a single long-lived event, or even 2 or 3. Looks like 5+, or 10 cycles. with a 5-10 Ma periodicity...

There seems to be evidence for glacial-related stratification of the global oceans with a huge ice cover (3 km over ALL the continents) and sea level fall of ~ 1 km, then an anoxic, organic-rich, acidic, cold CO2-rich deep ocean with warmer fresh-water CO2-poor water organic and nutrient-poor above. When these "mix", things get interesting. Like Lake Nyos, but on a global scale.

Paul Hoffman talked of carbonate sedimentation of 2-4 cm per year. Jonathon Giddings talked about continent-margin upwellings with active CO2 degassing and carbonate deposition. It'd be like a combination of the CO2 coming off a freshly-opened beer, and the scale forming in a kettle filled with "hard water".

There's some weird things happening there, and then, and some weird life. Go back to your "20 questions" game...

Q: "Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral?"

A: "I don't know!"