Signs point to sponges as earliest animal life

(PhysOrg.com) -- Even Charles Darwin was puzzled by the apparently sudden appearance in the fossil record of a great variety of multicellular creatures — a rapid blossoming known as the Cambrian explosion. Since then, the origin of animals was found to extend back earlier, through a period known as the Ediacarian. Now, evidence found by researchers at MIT, UC Riverside and other institutions shows that the first complex life forms may in fact have appeared much earlier still.

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