Our oldest ancestor was not exactly the most beautiful girl. A tiny zeeschepseltje from China, which has more than 540 million years ago in the mud on the seabed slogged is according to scientists the oldest animal in the evolutionary line to humans. That they say in the scientific journal Nature.
It was a strange creature with a bag for a body and a large gaping mouth. The scientific name of the funny guy is 'Saccorhytus coronarius' what 'crumpled bag' means.
With 200,000 years on the counter, man is a relatively recent appearance on the evolutionary stage, but according to Simon Conway Morris, a paleontologist at the university of Cambridge, we have "evolutionary much deeper ancestors" than the primates. The Saccorhytus is now the oldest known of.
less than 1 millimetre in size
The Saccorhytus was barely a millimeter big and is the most primitive member of the Nieuwmondigen, this tribe includes the vertebrates – fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals – but also the so-called echinoderms such as starfish and sea urchins.
The beast lived during the Cambrian era, an evolutionary 'explosive' era, because it is then that the Saccorhytus the characteristics (mainly mouth) that the evolutionary way of helping grease the skids for you and me. "Saccorhytus gives us a unique look at the first stages of the evolution that led to the fish and eventually us," said the Chinese paleontologist Degan Shu.
No rectum
The findings came after researchers forty well-preserved fossils found in China’s Shaanxi province. It turns out that the tiny creatures in shallow water, lived between the grains of sand with their mouths wide open to feed.
Spicy detail: on the fossil specimens of the creature is no anus to see, that gaping mouth had thus probably a tweerichtingsfunctie. Had the flexible conical protuberances on the body that may have served as 'gills'.
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