Researchers from the Australian National University (ANU) have put together a riveting report in which they detail how early man subsisted.
The international team of scientists analyzed ancient fossils from the Ediacaran period following their discovery in Russia in 2018 after which they established “world’s oldest meal” in a 550-million-year-old fossil.
Described as “the origin of us and all animals that exist today,” animals of the Ediacaran biota led to the modern animal. Ediacaran biota is believed to have lived on Earth prior to the ‘Cambrian Explosion’.
Published in the journal Current Biology last week, the team established, in a fossilized specimen of the slug-like Kimberella, “molecules of phytosterol preserved in the creature’s gut.”
According to a co-author of the study Jochen Brocks, a professor at the Australian National University, the nutrient-rich algae may have contributed to Kimberella’s growth.
“The energy-rich food may explain why the organisms of the Ediacara biota were so large. Nearly all fossils that came before the Ediacaran biota were single-celled and microscopic in size,” Brocks argues.
Explaining why Kimberella “was likely to be one of the most advanced creatures of the Ediacaran era,” Brocks said: “Scientists already knew Kimberella left feeding marks by scraping off algae covering the sea floor, which suggested the animal had a gut.”
But, he added, “it was only after analysing the molecules of Kimberella’s gut that we were able to determine what exactly it was eating and how it digested food.”
Similarly, according to the researchers, “another organism called Dickinsonia, one of Earth’s earliest animals, was a less advanced creature, without a mouth or gut. It grew up to 1.4 meters in length and had a rib-like design imprinted on its body.”
The Kimberella and Dickinsonia fossils were reportedly collected from cliffs near the White Sea in Russia’s north-west in 2018, by the study’s lead author, Dr. Ilya Bobrovskiy of the GFZ German Research Center for Geosciences.
“They were a mixed bag of outright weirdos, such as Dickinsonia, and more advanced animals like Kimberella that already had some physiological properties similar to humans and other present-day animals,” Bobrovskiy explained in a press release.
