Who is your weirdest relative? Is it your strange aunt who constantly ruins family lunches with her ability to turn any conversation into one about chemtrails? Is it your cousin who bought an air rifle to shoot birds from his bedroom window? Is it your dad?
It doesn’t matter, because you are wrong. Your strangest relative is in fact a relative we all share. It could be our earliest known ancestor: a tiny prehistoric creature with a weird bag-like body, a huge mouth and no anus. Again – not your dad, despite the obvious resemblance.
Here it is:
It’s called the Saccorhytus coronarius, and scientists say it lived 540 million years ago. It was discoveredin sedimentary rock in the Shaanxi province of central China, according to a new publication in the journal Nature.
It’s the oldest known member of a group of animals called deuterostomes – which include a huge number of species, from humans to starfish. Simon Conway Morris, professor of palaeobiology and co-author of the study, says its a pretty significant discovery:
In effect what we are suggesting here is that this is the earliest, oldest, most primitive of the deuterostomes. This is, if you like, the starting point of an evolution which led ultimately to things as different as a sea urchin, starfish and rabbit.
The creatures are only a millimetre in length, so the enormous mouth and minuscule anus is really just relative to its already puny body.
While Conway admitted that the team might have actually just missed the anus on this thing, he’s pretty sure it doesn’t exist. He also pointed to the fact there are other small organisms these days which crucially lack a butthole. “These things are so small, you can envisage something which is basically just a digestive sack with holes on the side.”
Imran Rahman, research fellow at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History told The Guardian that he’s pretty thrilled:
These are really interesting and to my mind surprising fossils. [They have the] potential to greatly improve our understanding of the early evolution of deuterostomes, which is the major group to which vertebrates – including humans – belong, so they are obviously going to be important going forwards for understanding our evolutionary history.
So there you go, folks. Your oldest ancestor is a millimetre long weird bag with a large mouth and zero butthole. Just in case anyone ever tells you you aren’t pretty.
Source: The Guardian.
Photo: S Conway Morris / Jian Han.
