Tag Archives: current

An international team of paleontologists has uncovered the earliest known multicellular fossils, pushing back the fossil record for such life forms to 2.1 billion years ago and suggesting that they lived 200 million years earlier than scientists had thought. Multicellular fossils may be world's oldest Fossils found in Gabon suggest complex organisms lived as far back as 2.1 billion years ago, paleontologists say. Photo: Paleontologists used X-ray tomography to virtually reconstruct the outer form, left, and inner structure of the fossil specimens. By Amina Khan, Los Angeles Times July 1, 2010 An international team of paleontologists has uncovered the earliest known multicellular fossils, pushing back the fossil record for such life forms to 2.1 billion years ago and suggesting that they lived 200 million years earlier than scientists had thought. Since most fossils in that period were microscopic and single-celled, finding fossils that stretched as long as 4.75 inches was “like ordering an hors d'oeuvre and some gigantic thick-crust pizza turning up,” said Philip Donoghue, a paleontologist at the University of Bristol, who co-wrote a commentary on the finding. The report detailing the fossils, along with the commentary, was published online Wednesday in the journal Nature. The organisms, which don't resemble modern-day living things, existed when Earth's atmosphere would have been uninhabitable for today's plants and animals. Their fossils provide “the first record of that fundamental threshold in organismal complexity being surpassed,” Donoghue said. “To put it into context, the godfather of evolutionary biology, John Maynard Smith, identified eight major events in evolutionary history; achieving multicellularity was one of these.” Get important science news and discoveries delivered to your inbox with our Science & Environment newsletter. Sign up