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The oldest sea sponges?
DOI: 10.1038/ngeo934
Fossils discovered in South Australia could be the remains of early sea sponges, suggests a paper published online this week in Nature Geoscience. If this interpretation is correct, they would represent the oldest fossil remains of simple animal life found to date.
Adam Maloof and colleagues discovered the fossils in rocks that are 640–650 million years old, and pre-date the youngest Snowball Earth glaciation. They took images of the fossils as they ground through the rocks, and used innovative computer software to stitch the pictures together into a three-dimensional representation of the irregularly shaped fossils, which measure about half a centimetre across. The reconstructions revealed a series of networked canals running through the fossils, each just under a millimetre in diameter. The authors conclude that the shape of the fossils and canal structure is most consistent with a simple, sponge-grade animal.
In an accompanying News and Views, Marc Laflamme writes, “As the search for ancient sponges continues, new palaeontological techniques and functional morphology studies, such as those presented by Maloof and colleagues, are likely to be instrumental in uncovering the roots of early animal evolution.”
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