Found: The Oldest Animal Ever on Planet Earth | Popular Science: Otavia antiqua could be the earliest human ancestor, predating the previous earliest known animal by tens of millions of years.
By Clay Dillow Posted 02.10.2012 at 10:55 am 17 Comments
Otavia antiqua courtesy Anthony Prave, University of St. Andrews via NatGeo
Our earliest evolutionary ancestor may have been found in the form of microscopic sponge-like organisms recently discovered inside extremely ancient African rocks. If that turns out to be so, it would displace animal life’s previous earliest known ancestor (unremarkably, another sponge-like “metazoan”) by predating it by perhaps 100 million years.
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