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Fossils may be 'earliest animals'

Started by Tank, August 19, 2010, 07:12:23 AM

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Tank

Fossils may be 'earliest animals'

QuoteTiny, irregularly shaped fossils from South Australia could be the oldest remains of simple animal life found to date.

The collection of circles, anvils, wishbones and rings discovered in the Flinders Ranges are most probably sponges, a Princeton team claims.

The rocks in which the forms were found are 640-650 million years old.

This is at least 70 million years older than some other claims for the most ancient animals in the fossil record.

The research, led by Professor Adam Maloof, is published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Interesting article. There was a gap in the very earliest part of the fossil record brought about by the fact that the very first animals had the physical constitution of leathery jellyfish and thus did not fossilise well, in fact mostly not at all. So one sees the first animals appear very rarely but in quite a complex form. This recently discovered transitional form was expected. The early Australian strata has been a rich source of the earliest animal fossils.

This is also the first evidence I have seen that shows animal life that pre-dates "Snowball Earth"

Quote"No-one was expecting that we would find animals that lived before the ice age {Snowball Earth}, and since animals probably did not evolve twice, we are suddenly confronted with the question of how some relative of these reef-dwelling animals survived the 'snowball Earth'."

{my clarification}

This is a very important discovery into the origins of our ancestors.
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