Oldest Animal: Fossilized While Hatching

An anonymous reader writes "Thousands of 600 million years old embryo microfossils have been found in China that may be among the first animals. It is a case of preserving the seemingly unpreserveable. The Precambrian coral-like animals seem to have spiral patterns that show some were preserved at the moment of hatching, according to the researchers: 'These organisms lived 600 million years ago -- before big animals. This would be the very first moment of animal evolution preserved in the fossil record.'"

Comments

Wish I had some concept of the size

[artifex2004]

The article says these are microfossils, but still - if they're big enough to survive this long, much less be sliced open for more detailed examination soon, they can't be all that small, can they?

Re:Wish I had some concept of the size

[Anonymous Coward]

If anything, the smaller a fossil is, the more likely it is to survive. And, with micromanipulators, we can slice anything open these days, down to individual cells.

Re:Wish I had some concept of the size

[Quelain]

TFA says 70 - 500 microns (1mm = 1000 microns).

They were 'sliced' with digital x-ray tomography:

http://www.microphotonics.com/skymto.html
http: //hhmi.genetics.utah.edu/microct/

Unanswered question

[EddieBurkett]

So does this mean we have fossilized evidence to answer whether the chicken or the egg came first?

Re:Unanswered question

[Anonymous Coward]

Gah, you made my brain hurt.

Re:Unanswered question

[FooAtWFU]

We already did. Dinosaur eggs, for one, were around long before chickens.

Wow.

[deemaunik]

Wow. 600 Million years old. I feel real young, small, and insignificant right about now.

Re:Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

Evolutionism? Do you also use the terms, "gravitism," or, "atomism"? It seems to me that your polemic is nothing more than an attempt to drag science down to the creationists' level. Rest assured that science is not some sort of alternate religion--it does not involve faith or magic. It does involve evidence and explanations for that evidence.

What's even worse is that you seem to believe that an intelligent sense of proportion is somehow wrong. The time during which humans have lived is small compared to the time during which the Earth has existed and the Earth is not the center of the universe. Sorry if this revelation damages your ego, but that's hardly a fault against the signifigance of this find.

Re:Wow.

[hyperquantization]

ok, first of all, Evolution is in itself an -ism. it is a sort of atheistic religion that fills in the gap for not having any kind of deity to explain things...well at least for as far back as evolution can go in time.
next:
THE SCIENCE YOU SPEAK OF IS ALL BASED ON FAITH IN THE FIRST PLACE! can we honestly say that this "reality", as we call it, is actually an absolute in and of itself? or is there an underlying, or overlying if anything, absolute that defines our very existence? if so, then science is NOT the basis of everything. in fact, science should NEVER be considered the basis of anything, it is merely an observation and analysis of what we can actually see, hear, smell, touch, and taste. there is NOTHING that we can possibly even try to observe that eludes all 5 senses. so what we cannot percieve, cannot be science, right? and you do agree that science can only be achieved by standing upon the sholders of those before us, yes? then someone, a long time ago, assumed that what they saw/heard/smelled/touched/tasted was what it was. science was built upon observations, and if observations are assumptions, then science must be in itself an elaborate assumption.

and also, in light of eternity, the time that the universe has existed shows up only as an infinitesimal blip. this sparks the realization of another couple things we cannot begin to comprehend due to our finite speck of knowledge: that which is infinite and/or infinitesimal.
......
but to return to the topic at hand: how were these fossils dated? how many samplings of the datings did they test? any other specifics?

Re:Wow.

[Cragen]

Whatever. I don't believe in anything. Absolutely. I don't even trust my own senses. ('Course, I never had any common sense, anyway.) I pretty much confine my thinking to those things that directly affect me. It's all I can handle. I leave the rest to people who can or have to deal with those all other things. One thing at a time. Have some peace today.

Re:Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously and sincerely:

My associates and I have been avid learners of the pros and cons of carbon and radioisotope specimen 'dating' for a very long time. Back around 1980, Mt St. Helens erupted, the whole world knows this and 99.999999999% of the people on earth are older than the lava dome that formed on this volcano.
Once it cooled, we took samples of that dome back to the lab for age verification.
It should have said 'one-year old' at best, after all, the rock we were testing was NOT ROCK until it reached the earth's surface and cooled! The tests said that the rock was, you guessed it, between, 2.5 and 8 million years old!!
WHAT!
The earth is allegedly hundreds of times older than that! This stuff did not get 'sucked' to the core of the earth straight from outer space where it existed in some pure, non-radioactive form and then spit out a few million years later at Mt. ST. Helen!
Obviously, there is no 'Black Hole' at the core of the earth spitting out new molten rock everyday!
According to my favorite astronomy website, over 100 tons of 'stuff' falls to the earth from outer space every day! Even if it the earth was only 10,000 years old, that would be 1,000,000,000 TONS of 'stuff' coating and layering every single square inch of his planet not to mention the naturally occuring radioactive stuff already here which would have been millions of years old when the earth itself had finally cooled enough to form oceans, according to the evolutionists theory.
My friends and I are going back up to St. Helens in few weeks to se what the university lab says we have found this time. Needless to say, we have decided that until the earth is a closed system, NOT to allow the dogma of alleged 'scientific proof' sway us until it can get its own house in order!!

Re:Wow.

[trixillion]

Hey shit for brains.

100 tons
10,000 years
365 days per year
3963 mile radius
5280 ft per mile
2000 lbs per ton
453 grams per lb

You know what that works out to? 60 milligrams per square ft. The worlds a big place and you are puny relative to it. Get over it. Also, how hard can it be to multiply 100*10,000*365 you were off by almost a factor of 3, wtf!

Re:Wow.

[astar]

Good science has the property that it increases man's efficient power over the universe. For instance, potential population density, which you might observe through your senses is higher than that of apes. This sort of sense reference is different than the sense-certainity you reference, in that it concentrates on the paradoxes sense-certainity serves up. That is why good science is not really a sense-certainity game. And it has the property that it is efficient with respect to the actual reality.

But I have the idea the unfortunate Bush victory has embolden some of the fundies to spout off. Bush's heartland is the old confederacy. Sort of GOP and slave-holder values, err, share-holder values. Back in the 20's there was a big religious revival in the south. The KKK's intinerate preachers were all over the Northwest. We had the Scopes monkey trial, which brings up this history lesson. And by 1931 the fundies were history. What happened? The depression. People got hungry and this increased their relative sanity. So as you watch the Bush wars and the Bush economy take us down in a spiral of poverty, remember this too shall pass, and so shall the fundies.

Re:Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

Science is not religion in the textbook definition of the word. Science also hasn't disproved creationism. Science also hasn't proven macro-evolution. There are alot of holes in Evolution (see Darwin's Black Box by microbiologist and genetecist Michael Behe). Science can also *not* discount religion, a higher being or an Intelligent Designer. Science is a lot of things, but so far it is not *above* the "creationists' level", since science hasn't been able to successfully prove or disprove the creationists point of view.

Title incorrect

[shrikel]

Shouldn't that be youngest animal?

Finally some linearity in the world

[Zareste]

*Sets down at his 4,000,000 year old computer and chomps a 56,000 year old hot pocket*

Is that all? 600 million? Mph, not bad for a bunch of lightweights. Is it too late to add some more zeroes already? I mean damn, these people must really be new to this; I've used every known dating method on my entire house, and frankly, my chair is older than that.

I used this knowledge once when I discovered that my mirrors actually evolved from the plates in my cupboard. Sounds farfetched, yeah, but hear me out. The National Organization for Plate Evolution (NOPE) was very skeptical of this theory, trying to tell me mirrors are made by 'intelligent life forms' of some sort. Can you believe that? Talk about a bunch of traitors. This nonsense went on until I said "Well uh, um... 300,000,000 years." at which point we threw a party. I'm now recognized as one of the leading authorities in America by NOPE and by the Organization for Really Gigantic Years (ORGY)

Now if you'll excuse me, my 345 billion year old steak isn't going to cook itself you know.

Re:Finally some linearity in the world

[|/|/|||]

Yeah, I get it, you're joking. Ha.

Hopefully I'm way off, but I think I detect some sort of disdain for science in your post. You may be making a funny, but there are a lot of idiots out there who take science for granted. They deny scientific knowledge that they don't like while taking advantage of the knowledge that brings them their cars and computers.

There are actually people in this country who won't believe that these fossils are 600m years old, without so much as an alternate explanation. That's scary, not funny.

Re:Finally some linearity in the world

[Zareste]

Where's the disdain for science? I don't see it anyw... Oh hahah, you're joking. That's understandable.

But in case you're not joking, it's much funnier if you believe tacking a whole bunch of zeroes onto the end of every imaginable number is responsible for creating computers. Oh and God knows we wouldn't have cars were it not for nut jobs who want everything to be 8,000,000,000 years old. I can actually picture that.
"Hey Bob, how do ya suppose well get it to move?"
"Use this pipe made five months ago."
*sputter*
"Gah, almost. Let's make it... five hundred billion months ago."
*vroom!*
"We did it! And it's all thanks to mindless pseudo-science!"
"Let's go to the bar. Millenium-old drinks are on me."

Sorry that numbers not ranging over a trillion years scare you. They probably had pills for that in the mesozoic era.

Re:Finally some linearity in the world

[pla]

Oh and God knows we wouldn't have cars were it not for nut jobs who want everything to be 8,000,000,000 years old.

Actually, they want it between 12 and 20 billion years, but otherwise correct - We wouldn't have cars if not for "nutjobs" like Copernicus ("Hey, check out this crackpot, he wants the Sun to orbit the Earth... Hah, why don't we just make the entire Crystal Sphere orbit my left pinky-toe?"), Kepler ("Ellipses? How about Rectangles? Or cardioids? Or the outline of England with a side-trip to the Isle of Man?"), and others of a similar disposition.

Science doesn't have all the answers. But you can't have the benefits of it while ignoring significant portions of the answers it does have. Did evolution happen exactly as the most popular theories claim? Perhaps not. But has the Earth existed for longer than 6000 years? No-brainer: YES.

Re:Finally some linearity in the world

[|/|/|||]

The point is that nobody "tacked on a bunch of zeros." The 600m number was calculated based on scientific theories. Nobody just pulled it out of their ass. The number may be wrong, but without a better theory it's what we've got. Think the number is wrong? Maybe you can make a sensible argument instead of just mocking that which separates us from the other animals.

Oh, and the universe is full of really big numbers. Do you think it's somehow beyond our capacity to deal with 'em?

An average dinosaur was as big as a large chicken

[leonbrooks]

...and probably tasted like one too.

This whole "first animal evolution" thing reminds me soooo strongly of monks hawking pieces of the genuine cross of Christ.

Also, if the first animal hatched then why do bird fossils - even proper dinosaur fossils - appear so late in the piece? Complexity can't be the answer, since even shrimp and trilobites are as complex as birds in their own ways. And horseshoe crabs - muck-dwellers right at the bottom of the fossil ladder - are still with us today. The fossil sorting we do see seems to be based more on environment and density than on any systematic idea of age.

Re:An average dinosaur was as big as a large chick

[Anonymous Coward]

"Also, if the first animal hatched then why do bird fossils - even proper dinosaur fossils - appear so late in the piece?" I've looked at this sentence a long time. I can't find any meaning in it. Leaving aside that I'm not sure what you mean by "late in the piece." It seems to imply that... birds must follow shortly on the development of the egg? What? Agreed, we'll probably never know what the *first* animal was, and that's just the reporter puffing up an offhand remark the researcher made. I think responding with meaningless drivel is a little extreme.

Re:An average dinosaur was as big as a large chick

[Quelain]

"Also, if the first animal hatched then why do bird fossils - even proper dinosaur fossils - appear so late in the piece?"

If the the first car had wheels, why did the quad cam v8 turbo 4WD appear so late in the piece?

'Hatching' is the general rule right up until mammals, and even then monotremes still lay eggs.

"The fossil sorting we do see seems to be based more on environment and density than on any systematic idea of age."

Yeah, sure it does. Take your creationist tripe elsewhere, this is the *science* section, not the fundamentalist christian religion section.

Evolutionary dead end

[Doc Ruby]

Since these animals were fossilized upon hatching, they didn't reproduce. They might have been the first *something*, but they weren't the ancestors of anything.

Take your materialist tripe elsewhere

[leonbrooks]

After all, this is the science section, not the philosophy section, and arbitrarily discarding data because it doesn't fit your philosophy is bad science.

A bird is not "better" than a shrimp or a trilobite. Stick a chicken a few fathoms down on a reef and you'll see what I mean. Both listed "primitive" aquatic critters have complex features which birds don't. Your analogy is like saying "these early cars use a steam turbine, why did it take so long to evolve a turbocharged V8?" The V8 is heavier, only burns one fuel, requires more support gear, and the materials technology involved is actually less advanced.

Re:Take your materialist tripe elsewhere

[Quelain]

That's pretty rich coming from a creationist. Perfect example of seeing a speck in your brothers' eye but not the log in your own eye, if you ask me.

I don't see any data cited in your post. I'm rejecting your *assertion* because it's standard unfounded creationist dogma. If you really believe palaeontologists got it so wrong, why not go out and find some evidence for your position?

Here, I'll give you somewhere to start looking. Lots of very nice 'allegedly' extremely old rocks there for ya. All you need is one of those 'marker fossils' (of the appropriate density) to have got 'mixed up' in the 'wrong' layer and you've got the best evidence yet for your conspiracy theory. Surely such a detailed web of lies as that map can be easily picked apart by someone prepared to objectively consider the evidence.

If you're short of work over there, as your journal would indicate, there's plenty of mining companies that will beat a path to your door once you've exposed the incompetence of Geoscience Australia.

Regarding the automotive reference, I replied to your silly question with another silly question, which I had hoped would illustrate the problem with your question. Pardon me for being one not so wise in the ways of automotive engineering as yourself.

Perhaps if you'd like to clarify your original question I could give you a sensible answer, but I
get the impression that you're just here to gain attention for your viewpoint.