New Organism Missing Link To Our Past?

Scientists have discovered the missing link between the two main life-forms on Earth.

19:26 07 May 2015

Scientists have said that they’ve “identified an organism that seems to represent a very distant cousin of ours and in doing so, it tells us something about our own dark past.” 

 

They added that the “missing link” between the two main life-forms on earth could explain the evolution of animals. 

 

Thijs Ettema of Uppsala University in Sweden, who led the research team, said: “We’ve identified an organism that seems to represent a very, very distant cousin of ours and in doing so it tells us something about our own dark past,”

 

“We are looking at the origin of complex life which occurred sometime after the origin of life itself. This discovery puts the origin of complex life in the spotlight,” 

 

It is believed that life on earth originated more than about 3.5bn years ago, but about 2bn ago it began to evolve into two broad branches – the “prokaryotes” and the “eukaryotes.”

 

Ettema added: “Initially we thought this was really weird, there must be some kind of contamination in our sample. We knew that there should be no eurkaryotes in these samples yet we saw these eukaryotic genes – so we thought this is either a contamination or something really interesting,” he said.

 

 

“The puzzle of the origin of the eukaryotic cell is extremely complicated, as many pieces are still missing. We hoped that Loki would reveal a few more pieces of the puzzle, but when we obtained the first results, we couldn’t believe our eyes – the data simply looked spectacular,”