+- Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum (https://www.scivillage.com)
+-- Forum: Science (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-61.html)
+--- Forum: Biochemistry, Biology & Virology (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-76.html)
+--- Thread: Evolutionary discovery to rewrite textbooks about multi-cellular animal origins (/thread-7217.html)
Evolutionary discovery to rewrite textbooks about multi-cellular animal origins - C C - Jun 13, 2019
https://phys.org/news/2019-06-evolutionary-discovery-rewrite-textbooks.html
INTRO: Scientists at The University of Queensland have upended biologists' century-old understanding of the evolutionary history of animals. Using new technology to investigate how multi-celled animals developed, their findings revealed a surprising truth.
Professor Bernie Degnan said the results contradicted years of tradition. "We've found that the first multicellular animals probably weren't like the modern-day sponge cells, but were more like a collection of convertible cells," Professor Degnan said. "The great-great-great-grandmother of all cells in the animal kingdom, so to speak, was probably quite similar to a stem cell. This is somewhat intuitive as, compared to plants and fungi, animals have many more cell types, used in very different ways—from neurons to muscles—and cell-flexibility has been critical to animal evolution from the start."
The findings disprove a long-standing idea: that multi-celled animals evolved from a single-celled ancestor resembling a modern sponge cell known as a choanocyte. (MORE)