Though they resemble jellyfish, comb jellies are different creatures, propelling themselves through water using cilia instead of tentacles. Scientists say the animals roamed the Earth 700 million years ago and can still be found in waters around the world.
Though they resemble jellyfish, comb jellies are distinctly different creatures, and propel themselves through water using cilia instead of tentacles. They are still part of the marine ecosystem today and can be found in waters all over the world.
"The most recent common ancestor of all animals probably lived 600 or 700 million years ago. It's hard to know what they were like because they were soft-bodied animals and didn't leave a direct fossil record," said Daniel Rokhsar, a UC Berkeley professor and co-author of the study, in a statement. "But we can use comparisons across living animals to learn about our common ancestors.
Many have argued that due to the sponge's primitive features, it came first — before the ctenophore, researchers said. This new research has determined that while sponges came early, they were likely second to ctenophores. "At first, we couldn't tell if ctenophore chromosomes were different from those of other animals simply because they'd just changed a lot over hundreds of millions of years," Rokhsar explained in the news release. "Alternatively, they could be different because they branched off first, before all other animal lineages appeared. We needed to figure it out."The "smoking gun" for researchers was when they compared the chromosomes of ctenophores to non-animals.
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