Mary Droser, a professor of geology at the University of California, Riverside, who signed the research, said:
None of these creatures had a head or skeleton. Many probably looked like three-dimensional bath mats on the sea floor. These animals are so strange and different that it is very difficult to put them into çağıl living organism categories just by looking at these creatures.
“Our work is a way of putting these animals in some ways on the tree of life. It also shows that these animals are connected to çağıl animals and us, ”said Droser, and emphasized that the DNA of the creatures examined could not be extracted. On the other hand, well-preserved fossil records enabled the appearance and possible behavior of animals to be associated with living things today.
In the study published in the refereed scientific journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 4 animals from the Edikara fauna were analyzed. The length of these creatures ranged from a few millimeters to about a meter.
Scientists think that the creature’s teardrop-shaped Kimberella was digging the seafloor with its proboscis to eat it. He predicts that the animal in question moved using “muscular feet”, as çağıl snails do.
Dickinsonia is said to be a flat and ruby-shaped animal with a series of raised lines on its surface, while the Tribrachidium spent its life immobile at the bottom of the sea.
Ikaria, the size of a grain of rice, identified last year was also analyzed in the study. This animal is thought to be the ancestor of creatures with bilateral symmetry (body type – ed.n. where a plane passing through the middle of the body divides the body into two identical halves). Scott Evans, of the research team, said that Ikaria probably had a mouth. However, there are no mouths in the fossil record.
The research showed that all 4 of the animals were multicellular and that they had different types of cells. Most of the symmetrical creatures had decentralized nervous systems and a muscular system.
The findings also showed that these creatures repair damaged parts of their bodies through a process called apoptosis. Genes that play a role in this process and eliminate virus-infected cells are the basic elements of the human immune system.
According to the researchers, the animals studied likely also had genetic parts associated with the head and sensory organs mostly found in the head. However, the interaction between the genes that would lead to these traits had not yet taken place.
Evans ended his words as follows:
It fascinates me that we can say that these genes have been used in something extinct for half a billion years.
Independent Türkçe, UC Riverside News, Science Alert
Compiled by: Uğurcan Yıldız
Source: https://www.indyturk.com/
