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Science

Oldest Animal: Fossilized While Hatching 27

Posted by michael from the sole-purpose-of-your-life-is-to-serve-as-an-example dept.
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.'"
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Oldest Animal: Fossilized While Hatching More

Oldest Animal: Fossilized While Hatching

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  • 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 (Score:3, Informative)

      by 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.
    • ...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 [ukonline.co.uk].

      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
      • "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 [tolweb.org], 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*
        • 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 burn
          • 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 [geoscience.gov.au]. Lots of very nice 'allegedly' extremely old rocks there for ya. All you need

  • Unanswered question (Score:5, Funny)

    by EddieBurkett ( 614927 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @06:31PM (#10705050)
    So does this mean we have fossilized evidence to answer whether the chicken or the egg came first?

  • Title incorrect (Score:4, Funny)

    by shrikel ( 535309 ) <{moc.liamg} {ta} {jrafgalh}> on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @07:40PM (#10705735)
    Shouldn't that be youngest animal?

  • Finally some linearity in the world (Score:3, Funny)

    by Zareste ( 761710 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @07:40PM (#10705737) Homepage
    *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.
    • 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 s

      • 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."
        *
        • 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 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?

  • 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.

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