Comb jelly ancestor may have been first animal to branch from tree of life
Sunday, May 21, 2023 - 14:33
in Paleontology & Archaeology
The first single-celled organisms drifted at sea. Then, some 700 million to 800 million years ago, clusters of cells joined together to form Earth’s first multicellular animal. More recently, the animal family tree split into two branches. One lineage gave rise to all other animals on Earth, from brontosauruses to badgers. The other, dubbed “sister of all other animals,” continued its separate evolutionary journey. For more than a decade, scientists have debated which animals alive today hail from that earliest sister, fingering two phyla as the most likely candidates: sponges and comb jellies. A study published today in Nature offers some of the strongest evidence yet that comb jellies are the true descendants of that sister. ...