’Seaweed-like’ fossils found in China push back date of large multi-celled life by 1 billion years

Seaweed-like fossils found in rocks in China dated to around 1.56 billion years ago are the earliest known examples of larger organisms made up of many cells built like our own.

Key points

167 fossils discovered in 1.56 billion year old rock are up to 30 centimetres long and eight centimetres wide Until now, fossils of multicellular life of this size weren’t seen in the fossil record until 600 million year ago Shape of fossils suggest organisms were photosynthetic

The discovery, reported today in Nature Communications, places the organisms in the middle of what had previously been known as the ‘boring billion’ period in the evolutionary history of life on Earth.

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Yeah, very exciting discovery.

Nearly a billion years earlier than previous well documented multi-cellular life. I for one, did not expect that there would be any early mesoproterozoic rocks found that were sufficiently un-metamorphosed to preserve carbonacous material. Especially with such well preserved cellular detail.

(Note, Grypania some other potential fossils are earlier, but preservation is such that it’s not clear whether they are uni- or multi-cellular.)

The original paper is a good read, with many more figures, including a photo of the outcrop where the fossils were found. It can be found here:

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160506/ncomms11500/full/ncomms11500.html

Both the thread subject and the article headline are misleading.

This doesn’t push back the date of life or multicellular life. Multicellular life arose at least 3 billion years ago:

The Evolution of Multicellularity: A Minor Major Transition?

Here, we focus on the evolutionary transition from unicellular to multicellular organization. The first evidence of this transition comes from fossils of prokaryotic filamentous and mat-forming Cyanobacteria-like organisms, dating back 3 to 3.5 billion years (Knoll 2003, Schopf 1993), with signs of cell differentiation more than 2 billion years ago (Tomitani et al. 2006).

This article is specifically about the development of large, eukaryotic multicellular organisms.

¿What’s the betting that the descendents of this organism all went extinct, and that later multicellular eukaryotes (such as the Ediacarans) are actually descended again from single celled ancestors?