Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Precambrian creature scrunches the origin of life even further

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All this complexity just sort of happened?

The revolutionary animal lived and died in the muck. In its final hours, it inched across the sea floor, leaving a track like a tyre print, and finally went still. Then geology set to work. Over the next half a billion years, sediment turned to stone, preserving the deathbed scene. The fossilized creature looks like a piece of frayed rope measuring just a few centimetres wide. But it was a trailblazer among living things.

This was the earliest-known animal to show unequivocal evidence of two momentous innovations packaged together: the ability to roam the ocean floor, and a body built from segments. It was also among the oldest known to have clear front and back ends, and a left side that mirrored its right. Those same features are found today in animals from flies to flying foxes, from lobsters to lions.

Traci Watson, “These bizarre ancient species are rewriting animal evolution” at Nature
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HY7a9IRvpRw

It’s not that much like the Cambrian creatures so far found but the big question is, how did life explode so quickly if it was only by chance? Why not just give up on that idea and study it for what it is?

Comments
Wow, it sure does! Thanks for the tip. Another "living fossil" for Darwinists to ignore. -QQuerius
October 30, 2020
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Great narration, great animation. Looks a LOT like a modern polychaete annelid.polistra
October 30, 2020
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Precambrian . . . amazing! I wonder how long a creature like that would take to evolve from scratch. In the closeups, doesn't it appear that they had tiny little ears like Haldane's rabbit? ;-) -QQuerius
October 29, 2020
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