Tag: sponges
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“I’ve Never Seen Anything Like It Before” – Unusual 550-Million-Year-Old Fossil Solves Paleontological Paradox
SciTechDaily has an interesting story about some of the earliest sponges. New research in the journal Nature suggests the earliest sponges did not have a mineral skeleton. Virginia Tech geobiologist Shuhai Xiao and his collaborators described an Ediacaran (550 million years old) sponge that had not evolved the ability to generate the hard needle-like structures,…
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PBS Eons: How Earth’s First, Unkillable Animals Saved the World
PBS Eons has another new episode. This time they discuss sponges and how they saved the world to allow more complex life to evolve. They have survived every catastrophe and every mass extinction event that nature has thrown at them. And by being the little, filter-feeding, water-cleaning creatures that they are, sponges may have…
