According to the scientists, orbit of Earth if warped by the gravitational pull of Jupiter and Venus in an epic cycle that repeats regularly every 405,000 years.

For the study, researchers drilled ancient rocks from deep under Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park.

In 2013, Kent and his team began drilling rock cores in excess of 1,500 feet long (457 metres) from a butte in the park, analysing them for radioisotopes that indicated their age and evidence of reversals in the polarity of the Earth’s magnetic field.

When they compared them with sediment samples from the Newark basin – a former prehistoric lake that spanned most of New Jersey – they found that the 405,000-year cycle is the most regular astronomical pattern linked to the Earth’s annual turn around the Sun, which dates as far back as 215 million years ago, to the Triassic period.

By confirming that this steady, metronome-like 405,000-year cycle dates back to a time before even the reign of the dinosaurs, the findings have implications to innumerable fields of research – potentially affecting how we interpret fossils and trace the evolution of life forms, to understanding more about planetary movements.

But perhaps the most topical area of science this could help us understand is pinning down how Jupiter and Venus – incredibly distant though they are –affect Earth’s climate, and how it inevitably undergoes heating and cooling changes over vast timeframes.

“Climatic cycles associated with the impact on our planet of Jupiter and Venus, and major changes occur every 400 thousand years.