New Ediacaran fossils; cholesterol found (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, September 21, 2018, 00:06 (2256 days ago) @ David Turell

A well-known Ediacaran has cholesterol in a 580 myo fossil form:

https://phys.org/news/2018-09-fat-million-years-reveals-earliest.html

"Scientists from The Australian National University (ANU) and overseas have discovered molecules of fat in an ancient fossil to reveal the earliest confirmed animal in the geological record that lived on Earth 558 million years ago.

"The strange creature called Dickinsonia, which grew up to 1.4 metres in length and was oval shaped with rib-like segments running along its body, was part of the Ediacara Biota that lived on Earth 20 million years prior to the 'Cambrian explosion' of modern animal life.

"ANU Ph.D. scholar Ilya Bobrovskiy discovered a Dickinsonia fossil so well preserved in a remote area near the White Sea in the northwest of Russia that the tissue still contained molecules of cholesterol, a type of fat that is the hallmark of animal life.

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"'The fossil fat molecules that we've found prove that animals were large and abundant 558 million years ago, millions of years earlier than previously thought," said Associate Professor Jochen Brocks from the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences.

"'Scientists have been fighting for more than 75 years over what Dickinsonia and other bizarre fossils of the Edicaran Biota were: giant single-celled amoeba, lichen, failed experiments of evolution or the earliest animals on Earth. The fossil fat now confirms Dickinsonia as the oldest known animal fossil, solving a decades-old mystery that has been the Holy Grail of palaeontology.'"

Comment: Animals had to come on the scene at some point in evolution, but the gap in complexity of form between the two periods, Ediacaran and Cambrian is still just as large.