One of the great challenges of paleontology is to know how multicellular life could have sprung up from simple unicellular beings, such as bacteria.
The finding of a geobiologist at Virginia Tech University, in collaboration with scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, suggests that this revolution took place much earlier than previously thought.
It is a fossil dated 600 million years ago , a time when the paleontological community believed that the Earth was only inhabited by extremely simple creatures.
"Similar fossils had been misinterpreted as bacteria, single-celled eukaryotes , algae, and transitional forms related to sponges, anemones, and bilaterally symmetrical animals," explained Shunai Xiao, a Virginia Tech professor and lead author of the discovery.
After unearthing the new vestige in the Chinese region of Guizhou , Xiao and his collaborators have found that it showed signs of adhesion between cells , specialization and programmed cell death, like today's animals and plants. Until now, only examples of such biological complexity have been found in the fauna of the Cambrian, a period that began 540 million years ago.
