650 million old animal fossil found in Australia

William Atkins
Tuesday, 24 August 2010 00:27

Science - Biology

Geoscientists have found fossils of sponge-like creatures in Australia that are thought to date back 650 million years ago – 70 to 90 million years earlier than previously found fossils.

 

U.S. geoscientists Adam Maloof and Catherine Rose, both from Princeton University (New Jersey), discovered the fossils of sponge-like creatures underneath a glacier deposit in South Australia, which is thought to be about 635 million years old.

The August 17, 2010 National Science Foundation (NSF) article “Discovery of Possible Earliest Animal Life Pushes Back Fossil Record” quotes Dr. Maloof.

Maloof states, "We were accustomed to finding rocks with embedded mud chips, and at first this is what we thought we were seeing.”

He adds, "But then we noticed these repeated shapes that we were finding everywhere--wishbones, rings, perforated slabs and anvils. We realized we had stumbled upon some sort of organism, and we decided to analyze the fossils.”

And, "No one was expecting that we would find animals that lived before the ice age, and since animals probably did not evolve twice, we are suddenly confronted with the question of how a relative of these reef-dwelling animals survived the ‘snowball Earth.'"

Maloof and Rose are part of a larger team whose expedition was funded by the NSF Division of Earth Sciences.

Page two concludes.