Nimal life likely existed s early as 890mn yrs ago
A Canadian scientist claimed to have found evie of the oldest form of anilife, in the form of sponges, arth, dating back 890 milyears ago or about 350 milyears older than what is ently the case. hese findings were pubd by Elizabeth Turner, seditary geologist and professor
the Harquail School of h Sciences at the Laurenuniversity in Sudbury, ario. Her peer-reviewed er was published by the nal Nature.
the paper, she stated, “If Little Dal objects are truly ge body fossils, they are r than the next-youngest sputed sponge body fossils brian period) by approxiely 350 million years.” ttle Dal refers to the area the reefs containing the ge fossils which were disred in the northwest terris of Canada. mbrian refers to the period oximately 541 million years which is associated with an losion” of the first animals he planet, as per fossil rds. ccording to an article in ure accompanying the y, these included arthro, molluscs and worms.
In response to emailed queries from the Hindustan Times, Turner said, “If I am correct in my interpretation of the material, it establishes that animals were already present by 890 million years ago.”
That would make these “350 million years older than the next-youngest undisputed sponge fossil”.
Though this may seem a big difference, she said it was “actually not all that surprising. We already knew that animals must have had a lengthy evolutionary history prior to the appearance of mineralised animal body fossils (such as shells and exoskeletons) in rocks younger than 540 million years. Molecular clock estimates place the origin of sponges in the same time-frame as the age of the rocks I worked on, and so it is not surprising to find possible physical evidence of sponges at that time”.
Turner collected the samples as a student from the ancient reefs and has argued they display complex structures unlike cyanobacteria and algae. She said, “I initially discovered the material accidentally several decades ago while working on my unrelated PHD research.”
The idea “gestated” in her mind, but what finally allowed her to publish was that there “have been a number of recent papers on how sponges get preserved, and that’s the information I needed to support the interpretation of my own strikingly similar but much older material”.