Complex, Multicellular Life from Over Two Billion Years Ago Discovered

now this is a great find considering complex life forms before this were thought to be at the earliest of life on earth 600 million years......just another check mark for science proving the earth to be 4.6 billion years old.....science rocks
www.sciencedaily.com...

[edit on 1-7-2010 by JTpirate]

reply to post by JTpirate


Thank you for the thread! That's some awesome news. Fossils are always interesting to me!

2.1 billion years is a HUGE leap form 600 million years! I wonder what they'll find in between this giant gap?

Kind regards

Well that makes evolution a little more palatable.

Now life has had around 3.5 times as long to evolve from relatively simple organisms to what we see today.

For a while I have felt that life on Earth as complex as us could not have evolved in the time it apparently has. Too much in too little time.

Yes, Science rocks! I am amazed at what our scientists can discover.

The Creator also rocks - because He created all of this for scientists to discover (to stop them from being bored).

So..either the entire universe was born out of nothing...

And by the way, if it was a random creation out of nothing, why do things make so much sense - and what about maths and music? Which match, by the way.

Or it was created.

So - a random nothing where things happen to vibrate in tune, or a creation by a higher being? An alien, in other words.

Originally posted by catwhoknows
Yes, Science rocks! I am amazed at what our scientists can discover.

The Creator also rocks - because He created all of this for scientists to discover (to stop them from being bored).

So..either the entire universe was born out of nothing...

And by the way, if it was a random creation out of nothing, why do things make so much sense - and what about maths and music? Which match, by the way.

Or it was created.

So - a random nothing where things happen to vibrate in tune, or a creation by a higher being? An alien, in other words.

What's wrong with random?

reply to post by hippomchippo


Nothing is wrong with random, except things don't tend to match at random.

Try looking in the washing machine for that random missing sock.

Originally posted by catwhoknows
reply to post by hippomchippo

 

Nothing is wrong with random, except things don't tend to match at random.

Try looking in the washing machine for that random missing sock.

That's a rather poor analogy when we're talking about the universe.
One would expect some things to match when you have trillions upon trillions of tries.

reply to post by hippomchippo


I thought it was an appropriate analogy to your question.

Originally posted by catwhoknows
reply to post by hippomchippo

 

I thought it was an appropriate analogy to your question.

The universe is a bit bigger than a washer though.

reply to post by hippomchippo


No, it's not, compared to all the stars and the planets, and the sheer size of it.

Damn double post.

[edit on 2-7-2010 by hippomchippo]

Originally posted by catwhoknows
reply to post by hippomchippo

 

No, it's not, compared to all the stars and the planets, and the sheer size of it.

Are you trying to argue that a washing machine isn't that small compared to the universe?

Originally posted by hippomchippo

Originally posted by catwhoknows
reply to post by hippomchippo

 

No, it's not, compared to all the stars and the planets, and the sheer size of it.

Are you trying to argue that a washing machine isn't that small compared to the universe?

I think he(she?) is. But you know what? I give up, there is a God... and he hates me.

Originally posted by OZtracized
Now life has had around 3.5 times as long to evolve from relatively simple organisms to what we see today.

For a while I have felt that life on Earth as complex as us could not have evolved in the time it apparently has. Too much in too little time.

We-e-ell, you know - as John Lennon said.

Those 600-million-year-old multicellular forms referred to in the OP article are known to palaeontologists as the Ediacaran fauna (lots of cool photos in link), named for the place in Australia's Flinders mountain range where they were first discovered. They have since been found all over the world, which means they were common, maybe dominant in their own period. But until quite recently, they were thought to bear no evolutionary relationship to modern life - that they were an evolutionary dead end.

Determining where Ediacaran organisms fit in the tree of life has proven impossible. The morphology and habit of some taxa (e.g. Funisia dorothea) suggest relationships to Porifera or Cnidaria. Kimberella may show a similarity to molluscs, and other organisms have been thought to possess bilateral symmetry, though this is controversial. Most macroscopic fossils are morphologically distinct from later life-forms: they resemble discs, tubes, mud-filled bags or quilted mattresses. Due to the difficulty of deducing evolutionary relationships among these organisms some paleontologists have suggested that these represent completely extinct lineages that do not resemble any living organism. One paleontologist proposed a separate kingdom-level category, Vendozoa (now renamed Vendobionta) Wikipedia

Opinions about that are changing, as the first link above shows. However, it may yet turn out that the Ediacaran forms, as well as the newly-discovered, much more ancient ones discussed in the OP article, are a kind of evolutionary dead end. It could still be that our own earliest multicellular ancestors evolved later, from a completely different prokaryotic strain, after the Ediacara died out.

Half a billion years is a long time. Multiply that figure by the billions of individual organisms that have lived over that period, and you'd surely have ample time for natural selection to produce the vast, complex variety of life on Earth today.

[edit on 3/7/10 by Astyanax]

Originally posted by catwhoknows
Yes, Science rocks! I am amazed at what our scientists can discover.

The Creator also rocks - because He created all of this for scientists to discover (to stop them from being bored).

So..either the entire universe was born out of nothing...

And by the way, if it was a random creation out of nothing, why do things make so much sense - and what about maths and music? Which match, by the way.

Or it was created.

So - a random nothing where things happen to vibrate in tune, or a creation by a higher being? An alien, in other words.

So... a universe that came out of nothing is harder to comprehend than a magical, invisible person in the sky... that came out of nothing?

Weird.

Anyway, this article is great, and a star and flag from me. It may or may not be essential to our understanding of modern life, but it is at least essential to understanding the world 2 billion years ago.

to xtians or other religious ppl who read this thread...... science doesnt disprove god......but it does disprove the bible........so if you want to be "christ" like you can be good without your bible full of lies contradictions and horrible things that the bibles god does.........also no proof of jesus..........i dont need the bible to tell me what is wrong and right......you shouldnt either

[edit on 3-7-2010 by JTpirate]

Could we please not destroy an interesting thread about a very interesting topic by rehashing those moronic god vs. evolution arguments, please?

There are more important and intelligent discussions we can have about this. For example: what does this say about the evolutionary lineage of life? Could it be that multicellular life evolved more than once?

Come on, kids, stop reacting like electrified frogs' legs and use your brains for a change.