World's earliest animal fossil found

lionking

In the Peanut Gallery
lionking
Joined
Jan 23, 2007
Messages
58,093
Location
Melbourne
Fossils of multi-cellular sponges 650 million years old have been found in Oman.

http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-02-04-voa77.cfm?rss=middle%20east

Earth scientist Gordon Love of the University of California, Riverside led the team that made the discovery. He says the 635-million-year-old fossils were found in sedimentary rocks in a seabed in southern Oman and are in the form of steroids, essential biochemicals in the cell membranes of sponges.
Click to expand...

The radio news report I listened to had one of the scientists involved say this discovery vindicates one of Darwin's beliefs - that there should be evidence of animals before the earliest, fully-formed, Cambrian fossils.

Comments.
 
VERY cool! Thanks for posting!!!

Aside; I am glad there are places where we can find these things without laws getting in the way. As I understand matters the Burgess Shale quarry where all of the marvelous creatures were found is closed to new study because the native americans consider it to be sacred. I'd probably hurt a lot of feelings if I fully said exactly how I feel about that.
 
BenBurch said:
VERY cool! Thanks for posting!!!

Aside; I am glad there are places where we can find these things without laws getting in the way. As I understand matters the Burgess Shale quarry where all of the marvelous creatures were found is closed to new study because the native americans consider it to be sacred. I'd probably hurt a lot of feelings if I fully said exactly how I feel about that.
Click to expand...

Why not - a fair few tons of material has already been taken from the site over the last 100 years, people have been going through these old fossils for at least 30 years fixing all the mistakes that had been made.
 
BenBurch said:
VERY cool! Thanks for posting!!!

Aside; I am glad there are places where we can find these things without laws getting in the way. As I understand matters the Burgess Shale quarry where all of the marvelous creatures were found is closed to new study because the native americans consider it to be sacred. I'd probably hurt a lot of feelings if I fully said exactly how I feel about that.
Click to expand...
It's strange how mining can occur on "sacred" aboriginal land when millions of dollars of royalties are paid out.

Sorry, off topic.
 
BenBurch said:
As I understand matters the Burgess Shale quarry where all of the marvelous creatures were found is closed to new study because the native americans consider it to be sacred.
Click to expand...
Well, their ancestors are buried there ...

---

However, I can't find any reference to this outside your post. Tourists are no longer allowed to fossil-hunt there, because the site is sacred to a strange tribe known as "scientists", but I see no hint that it's closed off to scientific investigation.
 
Last edited:
lionking said:
*snip*
The radio news report I listened to had one of the scientists involved say this discovery vindicates one of Darwin's beliefs - that there should be evidence of animals before the earliest, fully-formed, Cambrian fossils.
Click to expand...

Scientists have known about early multicellular life before the Cambrian for decades, it is called the Ediacaran biota. That sounds like an odd thing for a scientist involved to say. Perhaps these newly found fossils are older, but multicellular pre-cambrian fossils are well known.

I was up in the Flinders Ranges National Park a couple of weeks ago looking for Ediacaran fossils (you are not alowed to take anything, but they encourage you to have a look).
 
I wondered why all these scientists were poking around and using a microscope to examine me.
 
lionking said:
The radio news report I listened to had one of the scientists involved say this discovery vindicates one of Darwin's beliefs - that there should be evidence of animals before the earliest, fully-formed, Cambrian fossils.

Comments.
Click to expand...

That is sometimes used by creationists and "anti-evolutionists" as a
refutation of Darwin's theory. Darwin had written that "if [his] theory
were true" then the world must have "swarmed with living creatures"
before the Cambrian (Darwin actually wrote Silurian). That there is
(to the evolution deniers) no evidence of such a world was taken by
them to mean that Cambrian creatures had no ancestors and that
therefore Darwin's theory and/or evolution is incorrect.
 
Dr Adequate said:
Well, their ancestors are buried there ...

---

However, I can't find any reference to this outside your post. Tourists are no longer allowed to fossil-hunt there, because the site is sacred to a strange tribe known as "scientists", but I see no hint that it's closed off to scientific investigation.
Click to expand...

There go those wacky scientists and their weird tribal beliefs.
 
Yuri Nalyssus said:
Yup, about 650 million years before the end of the last ice age; do keep up.

Yuri
Click to expand...
:D :D :D

I suspect a typo. The writer may have intended to say "first ice age".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age#Major_ice_ages
The earliest well-documented ice age, and probably the most severe of the last 1 billion years, occurred from 850 to 630 million years ago (the Cryogenian period) and may have produced a Snowball Earth in which permanent ice covered the entire globe and was ended by the effects of the accumulation of greenhouse gases such as CO2 produced by volcanoes. "The presence of ice on the continents and pack ice on the oceans would inhibit both silicate weathering and photosynthesis, which are the two major sinks for CO2 at present."[9] It has been suggested that the end of this ice age was responsible for the subsequent Ediacaran and Cambrian Explosion, though this theory is recent and controversial.
Click to expand...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom