Scientists unveiled fossils from west Africa Thursday that push back the dawn of multicellular life on Earth by at least 1.5 billion years.
Just how complex the newly discovered organisms are is sure to be hotly debated.
But there can be no doubt that the creatures unearthed from the hills of Gabon, visible to the naked eye, have upended standard evolutionary timelines.
"The cursor on the origin of complex multicellular life is no longer 600 million years ago, as has long been maintained, but more like 2.1 billion years," said Abderrazak El Albani, a researcher at the University of Poitiers and lead author of the study.
The findings were published in the British journal Nature.
I am SO going to be reading that paper first thing.
That's gotta hurt, Ward.
1 comment:
So, the earliest multicellular life form was...an ear?
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