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Scientists from the Australian National University (ANU) and elsewhere have discovered fat molecules in an ancient fossil to reveal the oldest confirmed animal in the geological record that lived on Earth 558 million years ago .
The strange creature named Dickinsonia, which was up to 1.4 meters long and was oval-shaped with ribbed segments along its body, was part of the Ediacara biota that lived on Earth 20 million years ago before animal life.
Ilya Bobrovskiy, a doctoral researcher at ANU, discovered a well-preserved Dickinsonia fossil in a remote area near the White Sea in northwestern Russia, that the tissues still contained cholesterol molecules, a type of fat characteristic of animal life.
Jochen Brocks, Senior Research Associate, stated that "the Cambrian Explosion" was due to the fact that complex animals and other macroscopic organisms – such as molluscs, worms, arthropods and sponges – were beginning to to dominate the fossil record.
"The fossil fat molecules we found prove that animals were large and abundant 558 million years ago, millions of years earlier than expected," said Associate Professor Jochen Brocks of the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences.
"Scientists have been fighting for more than 75 years on what Dickinsonia and other strange Edicaran biota fossils were: unicellular giant amoebae, lichens, failed evolutionary experiments, or the first animals on Earth." Fossil fat confirms now Dickinsonia's oldest known animal fossil, solving a decades-old mystery that has been the holy grail of paleontology. "
Mr. Bobrovskiy said the team had developed a new approach to study the Dickinsonia fossils, which hold the key between the old world dominated by bacteria and the world of large animals that appeared 540 million years ago. of the Cambrian explosion.
"The problem we had to solve was to find Dickinsonia fossils that kept organic matter," said Dr. Bobrovskiy of the ANU Earth Sciences Research School.
"Most of the rocks containing these fossils, such as those in the Ediacara Hills in Australia, have been subjected to a lot of heat, a lot of pressure, and have been altered – the rocks that paleontologists have studied for decades, which is why they were stuck on the question of Dickinsonia's true identity. "
Palaeontologists normally study the structure of fossils, but Mr Bobrovskiy extracted and analyzed molecules from inside the Dickinsonia fossil found in ancient rocks in Russia to make a decisive discovery.
"I took a helicopter to reach this very remote region of the world – where bears and mosquitoes live – where I could find Dickinsonia's fossils with still intact organics," said Mr. Bobrovskiy.
"These fossils were located in the middle of the White Sea cliffs, which are between 60 and 100 meters high, I had to hang ropes from large blocks of sandstone, throw them, wash the sandstone and repeat this process until they reached the end. to find the fossils I was looking for. "
Associate Professor Brocks said that studying molecules from these ancient organisms was a game of chance.
"When Ilya showed me the results, I could not believe it," he said.
"But I also immediately saw the meaning."
The ANU led the research in collaboration with scientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Max Planck Institute of Biogeochemistry and the University of Bremen in Germany.
Research Document
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Australian National University
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The ancient amber reveals the diversity of lace during the Mesozoic
Washington (UPI) Sep 17, 2018
The discovery of more than two dozen amber fossils has provided scientists with new insights into the populations of lacewings that pollinated plants during the Mesozoic.
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In an article published this week in the journal Nature Communications, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences described the … read more
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