An interesting paper came out recently:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-022-01807-x
It's about the earliest cnidarians, a group that currently includes things like corals, anemones, and jellyfish. They're quite different from animals like ourselves - radially symmetric, no clear brain, but nerves and muscles that indicate we share a common ancestry. But that ancestry almost certainly predates the Cambrian, given that bilaterians do, and based on molecular evidence.
We now have Ediacaran fossils of cnidarians that back that up. And the fossil is pretty spectacular. It's got the polyps of a coral, but the tentacles of a jellyfish.
So, it seems like all sorts of interesting life forms had evolved ahead of the Cambrian, but it's taking a while to find them, probably because the global glaciations wiped out a lot of the sediments that might otherwise have preserved them.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-022-01807-x
It's about the earliest cnidarians, a group that currently includes things like corals, anemones, and jellyfish. They're quite different from animals like ourselves - radially symmetric, no clear brain, but nerves and muscles that indicate we share a common ancestry. But that ancestry almost certainly predates the Cambrian, given that bilaterians do, and based on molecular evidence.
We now have Ediacaran fossils of cnidarians that back that up. And the fossil is pretty spectacular. It's got the polyps of a coral, but the tentacles of a jellyfish.
So, it seems like all sorts of interesting life forms had evolved ahead of the Cambrian, but it's taking a while to find them, probably because the global glaciations wiped out a lot of the sediments that might otherwise have preserved them.
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