Multicellular fossils may be world's oldest

[wjfox]

An international team of paleontologists has uncovered the earliest known multicellular fossils, pushing back the fossil record for such lifeforms to 2.1 billion years ago and suggesting that they lived 200 million years earlier than scientists had thought.

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-fossil-20100701,0,2900726.story

http://www.latimes.com/media/photo/2010-06/54680753.jpg

[DJKillaQueen]

Nah...God made the world in seven days init ;-)

[HAL9000]

Actually, there is a some doubt about whether these are multi-cellular fossils. Some scientists say they are just as likely to be conglomerations of single-celled organisms much like the microbial stromolites that had already been around for over a billion years by then.

The big question is whether the new West African specimens truly represent large organisms growing in a co-ordinated manner, or are merely a record of the remains of aggregations of unicellular bacteria. -- 'Cookie-shaped' fossils point to multicellular life