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Perforated Blobs May Be Early Sponges
from Science News
Little asymmetric whatsits from Australia may be the oldest fossils of full-fledged animal bodies yet discovered, beating the previous contenders by tens of millions of years and pushing the evidence for animal life into an earlier geologic time.
The newly unveiled fossils, which resemble sponges, come from rocks between 635 million and 659 million years old, Adam Maloof of Princeton University and his colleagues report online in Nature Geoscience August 17. That timing sandwiches the fossils between two cold spells that iced over most of the planet during a Hollywood-disaster-style geologic period called the Cryogenian.
The proposed animal fossils do "have all the hallmarks" of being something more than just fragments of microbial mats, says biogeochemist Roger Summons of MIT, who was not involved in the study. These layers of single-celled organisms dominated the fossil record for billions of years before the appearance of true multicelled animals.
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