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Article: Australian fossils could alter views on when creatures first appeared.(The Dallas Morning News)
- Article from:
- Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
- Article date:
- June 10, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The array of modern animal life, from beetles to Beatles, may trace its ancestry to a few fossilized squiggles in an Australian rock.
To some scientists, the newly identified squiggles look like mucus trails left by modern worms. But these markings date back at least 1.2 billion years _ making them twice as old as any other evidence of animals.
That would place the fossils startlingly far back in the history of life, back in the time when bacterial bugs and algal slime dominated Earth. Conventional science holds that the first life forms appeared by at least 3.8 billion years ago, but true multicellular animals didn't show up until 600 million years ago. ...