Scientists find fossils of the earliest life billions of years ago, something that has never been described before

During the Paleogene period, the Earth released energy outward uninterruptedly, and the water vapor, carbon dioxide, and other gases released by the continuous eruption of high-temperature magma constituted a very thin early atmosphere - the primitive atmosphere. With the increasing amount of water vapor in the primitive atmosphere, more and more water vapor condensed into small droplets, which then converged into the rain and fell to the surface. In this way, the primitive ocean was formed.

The scientific community generally believes that the earliest life is born in this most primitive ocean. But in recent times, new clues are beginning to emerge about the way life evolved.

Back in present-day Scotland, a loch with geological deposits dating back a billion years contains the earliest known evidence of non-marine multicellular organisms. This is an exciting discovery that may explain: how animals evolved from the early ocean.

An astounding discovery

A super-specialized team of microscopists, geologists, paleontologists, and paleontologists excavated and described the fossil microbe, which they named Bicellum brassiere.

It appears to be a member of the holozoic, a synonym for a group of organisms containing animals and their single-celled relatives rather than fungi. This fossil microbe has been studied for several years on the beach at Lockriden, Scotland.

In 2011, the team described the microbe in more detail in the journal Nature, exploring the singularity and complexity of Bicellum brassiere in greater depth.

"We have discovered a primitive spherical organism that consists of two distinct cell types, the first step toward a complex multicellular structure," said University of Sheffield paleontologist Charles Wildman in a university press release, "something that the existing fossil record has never described."

The fossil is composed of tightly packed osteoblasts of cells surrounded by a ring of cell walls shaped like sausages at the periphery. But it is difficult to determine the function of the two different cell types, and to determine whether theirs had a reproductive function - it is too old, after all.

For life to make the dramatic transition from simple single-celled organisms to complex multicellular organisms, organisms had to evolve a genome that controlled the nature of cell division and how cells stuck together and needed to control their differentiation and separate organization. What is exciting about this fossil is that even though it is a very simple form, it can turn into a multicellular cell with some of the basic characteristics needed to do so.

This billion-year-old microbe is very simple, yet multicellular, and it appears to be most closely related to the overall fauna of Bicellomonas ichthyophila and monomorphic Trichoderma (certain single-celled microbes), according to the researchers. It is important to note that the rocky sediments with Bicellum basieri are freshwater environments, whereas usually to emerge the emergence of complex life starts in marine environments.

Previous studies have confirmed the existence of ancient multicellular life in the oceans, some dating back even to two billion years ago. Now it appears that there may have been more than one evolutionary pathway that led to the original multicellular life forms.

The sediments in the lake may perhaps hold even older microscopic life, and more in-depth investigation is needed. But I'm sure these scientists are having a blast, and this is a chance to reveal a big secret.

Postscript

This discovery shows that there seems to have been a lot of life struggling to evolve in the earliest times, eventually forming all sorts of animals, including us.

It turns out that the old ancestors were not necessarily alone, perhaps in the beginning we did not expect, it to be a big battlefield of evolution. At the beginning of the beginning, perhaps everything is more unexpected than imagined.