Oldest Animal Fossils Discovered in an oil field?

There is an oil field in the Arabian Peninsula that point known origins of higher life to more than 635 million years ago. Gordon Love of the University of California said: “It is, definitively, the earliest evidence for animals.” Interestingly “The animals’ remains don’t look like traditional fossils. They’re more like fossil echoes: chemical traces of a compound only produced — at least in modern times — by demosponges, descendants of what some scientists consider to be the last common ancestor of all animals.” What was the indicator to the discovery? A fatty chemical called 24-isopropylcholestane which was only found in demosponges’ skeletal structures and the clue the scientists needed. Sponges were believed to be modern descendants of the first animals, until recently. Click the read link for the full article.

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