Organism Closest To Original "Tree of Life" Discovered 198
An anonymous reader writes "Scientists have discovered a benign algae eating protozoan in a lake near Oslo, Norway whose gene sequence does not match any known organism living on earth today, and this beasty combines genetic characteristics across plant, animal, and fungal kingdoms. It is believed to be the closest living organism to the original organisms that spawned all animal life on earth."
Re:A bit of explanation to save you from RTFAing (Score:5, Interesting)
They did, once you get past the cellular stage. Multi-cellular creatures only have single inheritance (from a Pair<T,T>), and pretty much all of them implement the ISexualReproduction interface, though some implementations get really crazy and hacked together [youtube.com] (that's legacy support in action, the slugs only do that because their mating scheme was initially developed for underwater environments and nobody thought to make the code compatible with less-dense atmospheres).
It's just that some single-celled creatures have the crazy horizontal inheritance that causes so many problems in older programming languages; you end up with more of a crazed inheritance shrub, instead of a tree.