Weird lifeforms lived on Earth BILLIONS of years before our earliest ancestors evolved, scientists claim
Shock discovery suggests a temporary blip allowed strange forms of life to briefly flourish, before a mass extinction wiped them out
ADVANCED animal-like creatures may have lived on Earth billions of years before our earliest ancestors appeared, scientists have claimed.
The shock discovery suggests bizarre lifeforms appeared on the planet, before being wiped out in a mass extinction.
Life on Earth is thought to have developed about 800 million years ago.
Now scientists believe animal-like creatures inhabited the seas for a period of time before that.
Scientists claim a little understood phenomenon called the Logamundi Event gave a mysterious species of complex life forms a "false start".
And the theory could form a grim prediction of our own fate on Earth.
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Rocks reveal that the amount of organic carbon deeply buried in the ocean spiked during this freak event - and formed a perfect climate for life.
However, levels of this vital gas then plummeted again, which would killed off early lifeforms before they had a chance to evolve.
"The take-home message is that the oxygen level was high enough to support eukaryotic life and, by some arguments, maybe even animal life,” Timothy Lyons at the University of California Riverside, told .
For now, the only evidence we have is that large colonial organisms - or bacteria - were present.
"But that doesn’t mean that those organisms didn’t exist," says Michael Kipp from the University of Washington in Seattle.
Just look at the dinosaurs, he pointed out.
"With palaeontology, it’s difficult to argue that absence of evidence is evidence of absence," he added.
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