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Scientists discover ancient 'lost world' that rewrites history of life on Earth
- mojo74 3y agoSurely everything scientists discover 'rewrites' our understanding of something? That's the whole point isn't it? Interesting article though.
- Timon3 3y agoNo, why? A discovery can fit in with your existing models, maybe even be predicted. You discover it, but you don't change your understanding, only expand it.
- dlkf 3y agoLots of discoveries are confirmatory. We already believed relativity was true before we observed observing binary pulsars obeying it.
- stareatgoats 3y agoYou're right of course, but some editor thought it too cumbersome (and not so sensational) to write "fills a major gap in our understanding of the early evolution of eukaryotes", so they wrote "history" instead which allows much more room for the imagination.
- adrinux 3y agoOr not. Link now 404s. Looks like the article was withdrawn.
- isaacfrond 3y agoworks fine for me?
- bdhcuidbebe 3y agoPEBKAC
- compressedgas 3y agoThis article linked to https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06170-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06170-w > Lost world of complex life and the late rise of the eukaryotic crown
- adrinux 3y agoCheers. That looks more interesting than the other headline too.
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoSome many chances for early life to have hung on, delayed change, stalled evolution. These early organisms hung on for 100's of millions of years, dominating and out-competing later forms until gradually they were in turn out-competed. Same with Dinosaurs! They dominated for 200M years. But for a chance asteroid we could still be a planet of dinosaurs. No sign of them giving up in the fossil record. We find other planets with life, likely will be stalled in one of these cul-de-sacs. Our own existance can be explained by observer's paradox - we didn't get stalled which is why we're here which is why we can wonder about these things!
- borissk 3y ago>> No sign of them giving up in the fossil record. Actually there are signs in the fossil record that dinosaurs weren't doing very well even before the K–Pg extinction.
- gpvos 3y agoSome context: between 1.8 and 0.8 billion (milliard) years ago, the Earth went through a period colloquially called the "Boring Billion", when tectonically and climatically almost nothing happened. Evolutionarily, however, this was the period when multicellularity and sexual reproduction developed. I guess that those developments were really complicated, so it took a lot of time before evolution chanced upon them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boring_Billion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boring_Billion https://youtu.be/0sbwUeTyDb0 https://youtu.be/0sbwUeTyDb0 (recommended video and series)
- borissk 3y agoI've read somewhere that we're the second wave of multi-cellular organisms that evolved on Earth - coming from worms, fish, tetrapods, etc. But there's evidence of an earlier evolution of multi-cellularity, those poor things dying out and leaving very few fossils.
- gpvos 3y agoMaybe you are referring to the Ediacaran period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ediacaran_biota https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ediacaran_biota , which happened a bit later. Something like it can have happened before that as well, but that is more the subject of current research like in the featured article.