azoic

Meanings

1. 1
   adj

   containing no evidence of life or dating from a time believed to precede life

   The geologist described the deepest strata as azoic because they contained no fossils.

Formed from a- ("without") and -zoic ("relating to life"), ultimately from Greek zoe ("life"). Nineteenth-century geologists used Azoic for rocks or an imagined earliest interval thought to contain no traces of organisms.

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