890-Million-Year-Old Fossils Are Sponges, Oldest Animals

Amazing stuff!

"Scientists predict that sponges—among the most basic animals—arose a few hundred million years before the occurrence of the oldest confirmed fossil specimens, which date to about 500 million years ago. Now, in a study published today (July 28) in Nature, Elizabeth Turner, a geologist at Laurentian University in Canada, identified structures in 890-million-year-old fossils of organisms similar to modern bath sponges, potentially pushing back the emergence of the animals to at least that long ago."

"... This Article presents petrographically identical vermiform microstructure from approximately 890-million-year-old reefs. The millimetric-to-centimetric vermiform-microstructured organism lived only on, in and immediately beside reefs built by calcifying cyanobacteria (photosynthesizers), and occupied microniches in which these calcimicrobes could not live. If vermiform microstructure is in fact the fossilized tissue of keratose sponges, the material described here would represent the oldest body-fossil evidence of animals known to date, and would provide the first physical evidence that animals emerged before the Neoproterozoic oxygenation event and survived through the glacial episodes of the Cryogenian period."

890-Million-Year-Old Fossils Are Sponges, Oldest Animals: Study | The Scientist Magazine® If confirmed, the findings indicate that animals appeared on Earth [hundreds of] millions of years earlier than previously believed.

Possible poriferan body fossils in early Neoproterozoic microbial reefs (public access)