635 Million-Year-Old Animal Traces Discovered
New research in the South Oman Salt Basin shows evidence of animal life dating back much further than the first appearance of other significant life forms.
Chemical traces of the minute marine sponges, called demosponges were observed by a research team led by the University of California, Riverside geochemist Dr. Gordon D. Love. Desmosponges include the species most consumsers are familiar with: the bath sponge. These over 500 million-year-old sponges however, were probably much smaller due to a lack of oxygen available during their geological period. The fact that they existed 200 million years before plants appeared on land, shows just how very old they are.
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One of the researchers, MIT biologist Roger Summons remarked, “There is a great wealth of evidence these sponges were the first multi-cellular organisms to exist.”
A fascinating thing about sponges is the theory that most of them don’t leave a conventional physical fossil remnant after death. Because they are composed mainly of silica, they may dissolve gradually leaving only chemical traces. (Silica we find in the environment mainly as sand). Sponges have existed in our seas since Precambrian, or Cryogenian times.
The Cryogenian references the period from the earth’s formation to the appearance of multi-cellular organisms in large numbers. The earth’s formation reportedly took place 4,500 million years ago. Another geological global landmark: Gondwana would have formed about 500 million years ago. So the sponge life that was recently documented, existed about 135 million years before the time when Africa and South America were still part of the same landmass.
Image Credit: Rochester Academy of Science, 1968, Getting Aquainted (sic) with the Geological Story of the Rochester and Genesee Valley Areas.”
