Research shows a surprising similarity between humans today and the first animals on earth. As the findings specify, the olden multicellular organisms may have had no heads, arms or legs, but pieces of them stay inside of humans up to this present time.
According to a Phys.org report, the UC Riverside study indicates that creatures from the Ediacaran period, over 550 million years old, share genes with present-time animals and even humans.
Mary Droser, a UCR geology professor said, none of these creatures had skeletons or heads. Many of them, she added, looked like "three-dimensional bathmats on the floor," round discs that stuck up.
The professor added these animals are so weird and different and it is quite hard to assign them to modern classifications of living organisms by simply looking at them. It is not like their DNA can be extracted because they can't be.
Over 40 Animal Species Identified from the Ediacaran Era
Well-preserved fossil records though have allowed Droser and the first author of the study, Scott Evans, a recent UCR doctoral graduate, to associate the appearance and likely behaviors of animals to a genetic assessment of present living things. Their study on such associations has been published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B journal.
For their investigation, the study authors considered four animal representations of the over 40 recognized species that have been identified from the Ediacaran period. These creatures varied in size from a few millimeters to almost one meter long.
Specifically, Kimberella was described in this study as teardrop-shaped creatures with a single broad, rounded end and a single narrow end that possibly scraped the seafloor to get food using proboscis.
Moreover, they could move around with their muscular foot as snails do this present time. The research also comprised flat, oval-shaped Dickinsonia, as seen on the Guardian News' YouTube video below, with a series of raised bands on their surface, and Tribrachidium, which lived their lives powerless or immobilized underneath the sea.
Another animal species examined are those recently discovered by a group of scientists that included Droser and Evans. They were roughly the and shape of a rice grain and characterized the first bilaterians, organisms that had front, back and openings at either end connected by a gut.
According to Evans, it is possible that Ikaria had mouths, although those were not preserved in the fossil records, and they crawled by means of organic matter, eating as they went.
All Animals Studied Found Multicellular
All four of the animals studied were found multicellular. Meaning, they had cells of different types. Most of them had symmetry on their both their left and right sides, and non-centralized nervous systems, as well as musculature.
In addition, they appear to have been able to fix impaired parts of the body through a process called apoptosis. These same genes are key elements of immune systems of humans, helping to eliminate virus-infected and pre-cancerous cells.
Furthermore, these animals potentially had the genetic parts responsible for the sensory organs, as well as the heads, that usually exist there.
Nonetheless, the complication of interaction between these genes would give rise to such characterizations had not yet been attained.
Evans said that the fact that such genes were operating in something that has been extinct for have a billion years is fascinating to him.
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