Gizmodo posted:

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Scientists believe that this is the animal from which everything else evolved. The first multicellular being that spawned every living being in this world through billions of mutations, from fish to amphibians to reptiles to birds to mammals to you.

It's an amazing discovery.
Its name is Otavia antiqua, and it is the oldest animal ever discovered: 760 million years old. Scientists claim that it used to chill out in calm, nice, shallow waters, chewing on algae and bacteria through its pores and into its little tube body.

Otavia was a sponge. A tiny one, no larger than a grain of sand. Paleontologist Dr. Bob Brain—famous for his work in hominids before his retirement—and geologist Anthony Prave—from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland—found the fossils of many hundreds of Otavia specimens in a rock at Etosha National Park, in Namibia. According to Prave, "certain samples would likely yield thousands of specimens. Thus, it is possible that the organisms were very abundant."

Apparently, it was also very resilient. The research data—published in the South African Journal of Science—shows that it survived at least two Snowball Earths, events that researchers think happened more than 650 million years ago. During a Snowball Earth period, the entire planet was almost entirely covered with ice.

The little critter persevered almost unchanged through those times, resisting along with algae and bacteria for roughly 200 million years, just before the Cambrian explosion, when Earth started to fill up with many different animals.

Dr Brain—who is an expert in predation—believes that Otavia was also the Earth's first predator. During those very early days, it sat on top of the food chain, uncontested, eating his food even while it had no means to hunt. According to him, it was the first in the evolutionary arms race. Otavia, he says, "led to man dominating the planet."

It doesn't look too menacing to me, but considering the its track record through those hundreds of millions of years, maybe Otavia was a BMF in disguise, after all.

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dae_trist posted:

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WHARRGARBL

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BubbleDude posted:

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dae_trist posted:

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WHARRGARBL

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SirGarth posted:

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meet Otavia antiqua, your oldest ancestor

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Scarne posted:

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2.5 billion years ago, cyanobacteria nearly wiped all life off the Earth by being the first critters to release oxygen as a metabolic waste process which was poisonous to everything else alive at the time and created an ice age that they themselves were ill suited to survive.

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sweeny_comodore posted:

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Scarne posted:

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2.5 billion years ago, cyanobacteria nearly wiped all life off the Earth by being the first critters to release oxygen as a metabolic waste process which was poisonous to everything else alive at the time and created an ice age that they themselves were ill suited to survive.

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was it a "snowball earth" ice age?
planet completely covered in ice from poles to equator?

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Yossarian_42 posted:

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A liberal Muslim homosexual ACLU lawyer professor and abortion doctor was teaching a class on Karl Marx.

"Before the class begins you must get on your knees and worship Marx and accept that he was the most highly-evolved being the world has ever known, even greater than Jesus Christ!"

At this moment, a brave, patriotic, pro-life Navy SEAL champion who has served 1500 tours of duty and understood the necessity of war and fully supported all military decisions made by the United States stood up and held up a rock.

"How old is this rock?"

The arrogant professor smirked and smugly replied, "4.6 billion years, you stupid Christian"

"Wrong. It's been 5,000 years since God created it. If it was 4.6 billion years old and evolution, as you say, is real... then it should be an animal now"

The professor was visibly shaken, and dropped his chalk and copy of Origin of the Species. He stormed out of the room crying those liberal crocodile tears.

Semper Fi.

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Abaddon_Ambrosius posted:

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SirGarth posted:

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meet Otavia antiqua, your oldest ancestor

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I'd do her.

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eodoll posted:

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I wonder why humans didnt keep the ability to photosynthesize

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B_Shinkicker posted:

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Sirs, perhaps there are those among you who believe you are descended from a ape. I suppose there may even be those among you who believe that I am descended from a ape. But I challenge the man to step forward who believes that General Robert E. Lee is descended from a ape.

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eodoll posted:

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I wonder why humans didnt keep the ability to photosynthesize and the ability to breathe underwater? Those seems like really handy bilities to have for survival. And its unfortunate that we lost our ability to eat bacteria ridden decayd flesh.

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Mag-Galahad posted:

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so this thing was the pinnacle of life on earth from 650 million years ago, till about 200 millions years ago when life suddenly exploded around the cambrian period...

Correct me if im wrong, but there seems to be a gap in the evolutionary timeline there. How do we get from a sponge to a T-Rex that quickly?

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ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny

Yukishiro1 posted:

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My daddy weren't no sponge!!11

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vn_nnanji posted:

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Yukishiro1 posted:

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My daddy weren't no sponge!!11

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But it seems your Mommy forgot hers!

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Scarne posted:

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B_Shinkicker posted:

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Sirs, perhaps there are those among you who believe you are descended from a ape. I suppose there may even be those among you who believe that I am descended from a ape. But I challenge the man to step forward who believes that General Robert E. Lee is descended from a ape.

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General Robert E. Lee was descended from an ape.

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B_Shinkicker posted:

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Scarne posted:

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General Robert E. Lee was descended from an ape.

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BANG!

THUD!

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