Sponge Like Fossils Could Be Oldest Animal Ever Found, or Just Squiggles nytimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from nytimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Feb. 24, 2021 , 6:00 PM
Evolutionary biologist Thibaut Brunet was studying single-celled organisms called choanoflagellates when he noticed something strange: The microbes are typically rigid, but when they got trapped in a tight space, they started to move like
The Blob (see video, above). In his lab at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, he watched as their external whiplike flagella disappeared; parts of their bodies began to push out, forming bubbles called blebs; and they were able to squeeze into new spaces, like jelly pushing through a maze.
Because choanoflagellates are close relatives of animals, the find suggests complex movements first evolved in the ancestors of both groups. It also lends support to the idea that animals evolved from an ancestor that resembled choanoflagellates, says Maja Adamska, an evolutionary developmental biologist at Australian National University who was not involved with the work. “The finding is so clear it just makes you wonder wh