Your earliest ancestor was tiny, weird and had a big mouth
An international team of palaeontologists have been investigating a 540-million-year-old blob in central China from which we descended
Don’t take this the wrong way, but your oldest ancestor was not exactly a beauty.
Scientists on Monday said a tiny marine creature from China that wriggled in the seabed mud about 540 million years ago may be the earliest-known animal in the lengthy evolutionary path that eventually led to humans. It was a weird-looking beastie with a bag-like body and, for its size, a really big mouth.
University of Cambridge palaeontologist Simon Conway Morris noted that humans, who appeared a relatively recent 200,000 years ago, have a series of “evolutionarily deeper ancestors” than monkeys and apes. That point is exemplified by the unique-looking creature called Saccorhytus, whose Greek name means wrinkled sack.
“And is not beauty in the eye of the beholder?” Conway Morris asked.
Saccorhytus, measuring about 1 millimetre, appears to be the most primitive member of the broad animal group called deuterostomes.