Microbes that gave rise to all plants and animals became multicellular 1.6 billion years ago, tiny fossils reveal

A new study describing a microscopic, algalike fossil dating back more than 1.6 billion years supports the idea that one of the hallmarks of the complex life we see around us—multicellularity— is much older than previously thought. Together with other recent research, the fossil, reported today in Science Advances , suggests the lineage known as eukaryotes— which features compartmentalized cells and includes everything from redwoods to jellies to people— became multicellular some 600 million years earlier than scientists once generally thought . “It’s a fantastic paper,” says Michael Travisano, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Minnesota who helped show that yeast can become multicellular in the lab . “This gives us a better idea of the grand vision of life.” Typically, biologists subdivide that grand vision into two categories: eukaryotes, with their DNA packaged into nuclei, and prokaryotes such as bacteria, which have free-floating DNA. Prokaryotes evolved first, up to 3.9 billion years ago; within a few hundred million years, some of them, the cyanobacteria, began to form chains of cells, considered an advance in life’s complexity. About 2 billion years ago, much larger, single-cell eukaryotes bearing nuclei showed up. For decades, researchers thought eukaryotes didn’t form simple multicellular structures until 1 billion years after they arose, and that once chain structures evolved, more elabora...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news