You come from this....Oldest Animal Ever Discovered

[Ichingcarpenter]

Does it look like your relative? Its a sponge.













JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Scientists have discovered fossils in Namibia that they say are the world's first animals.

The sponge-like fossils dubbed Otavia antiqua were found at Etosha National Park in northern Namibia and at other sites in the southern African country, a team of international researchers said in an article published in the South African Journal of Science.

Otavia antiqua is said to be a tiny creature that lived in the world's earliest oceans, surviving in low-oxygen conditions.

While animal life was previously thought to have emerged 600 million to 650 million years ago, these fossils were discovered in rocks dated to between 760 million and 550 million years ago, researchers said.

snip




The discovery is "extremely significant, as these organisms represent the earliest record of metazoan life," placing the origins of animals at 100 million years to 150 million years earlier than previously accepted, wrote Robert Gess from South Africa's Wits University, in a separate article published in the journal.

"The rocks of southern Africa have yet again yielded up key evidence regarding the history of life," Gess wrote.


http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/africa/120206/namibia-fossils-first-animals-otavia-antiqua-etosha-national-park

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. Did it live in a pineapple under the sea?

[krispos42]

5. DUzy!

[AverageJoe90]

11. Absorbent and yellow and porous is he! SpongeBob Squarepants!

If nautical nonsense be something you wish, SpongeBob SquarePants!

Then drop on the deck and flop like a fish! SpongeBob SquarePants!

SpongeBob SquarePants, SpongeBob SquarePants,
SpongeBob SquarePants!

SpongeBob SquarePaaaaannttss!!!

[seeviewonder]

12. Thank you for the laugh!

I needed that!

[expatriate2mex]

17. In an octopuses garden.....oh wait, octopi were not around then.nt

[HopeHoops]

2. I think that's my left lung.

[peace frog]

3. They dug up Grandma, for pity's sake!

Please put her back in the ground, she's horribly sensitive to bright light.

[tridim]

4. That sucks.

[dmallind]

15. On the contrary - I find it ....absorbing.

[tridim]

16. Yea, after I posted that I realized it wasn't that clever. Yours is better. :)

[Kennah]

19. Trying to squeeze out every drop?

[eppur_se_muova]

6. Well ... you come from a *relative* of this. :)

It's very unlikely that any particular fossil organism is our direct ancestor, even if it's from the right phylum, class, order etc. The best we can say is that it's from a genetic population that's very close, *possibly* identical, to the one that led to us.

("If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" is the question to which this is the answer. We evolved from particular populations of primates, none of which exists today, but some of which split from the ancestors of surviving primate populations. The more recent the split, the more similar our genomes to those surviving primates. But none will have a genome identical to our direct ancestors -- those genomes evolved into us, or into other well-adapted, hence relatively long-surviving, primate populations.)

[RainDog]

9. the tree of life...

is a beautiful thing.

[Odin2005]

13. Not that particular one, but the common ancestor of animals WAS a sponge.

[Orsino]

7. I have its nose. n/t

[LiberalLovinLug]

8. Wow, I thought Eraserhead was a fictional movie

I guess not!

[TBF]

10. The sonograms of my children look remarkably similar ...

nt

[separationcs]

14. Further explanation of the exhusband..... n/t

[Lucky Luciano]

18. Cool! I have been to Etosha National Park,

...but I only got to see rhinos, elephants, giraffes, zebras, springboks, red deer, ostriches, jackals, warthogs, etc!

[lunasun]

23. dont forget all the flamingos!! I still have some feathers from that place somewhere here....

[lastlib]

20. I think Newt Gingrich evolved from something even lower.....

[grahamhgreen]

28. From or into?

[lastlib]

31. yes.

[grahamhgreen]

32. ...

[lastlib]

21. I have some relatives that are sponges

So I guess there's something to all this "evillootion" tuff.

[progressoid]

22. Piffle. More scientific mumbo jumbo.

[HowHeThinks]

25. Are those guys serious?

Using their "logic" it could be said that a man's penis was created by god for insertion into the human mouth.

Fundies will grasp at any straw, no matter how ridiculous, to "prove" the existence of a creator. These two guys are loco.

[progressoid]

26. Sadly yes.

I don't think Kirk Cameron can act that well. Yes, the guy on the right is Kirk Cameron of "Growing Pains" fame. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0131647/ Together with Ray Comfort they have elevated stupidity to an art-form.

[dmallind]

27. And of course the wonderful irony that such banans are human-designed hybrids

The natural banana given to us by God has a tough fibrous husk very difficult to split, and is full of rock hard seeds. That, Ray, is the work of Cavendish, not Christ.

[grahamhgreen]

30. Well, this moron has no idea how to peel a banana properly - he needs to learn from

the monkeys:

[Harry Monroe]

24. Are we spongeworthy to be its descendant?

[jtuck004]

33. This theory has a lot of holes in it. n/t