Scientists may have found world's oldest animal

Scientists in their determination process looked at genes in the chromosomes of the creatures.

Scientists may have found world’s oldest animal. In a new study, scientists may have found a jellyfish-like animal that existed on Earth about 700 million years ago, travelling across the ocean for food, reported CBS News.

The experts have said that the animal was likely to be a comb jelly or ctenophore, according to a press release of the study from the University of California Berkeley.

The research published in the journal Nature identified animals resembling jellyfish, comb jellies are distinctly different creatures. They move in water using cilia instead of tentacles.

These animals are currently found in marine ecosystems around the globe.

Daniel Rokhsar, a UC Berkeley professor and co-author of the study, said in a statement: “The most recent common ancestor of all animals probably lived 600 or 700 million years ago. It’s hard to know what they were like because they were soft-bodied animals and didn’t leave a direct fossil record.”

“But we can use comparisons across living animals to learn about our common ancestors.”

The university also noted that there has long been a debate on which animal came first — the ctenophore or the sponge.

Sponges are the sea creatures that live most of the time staying in one place and getting their food by filtering water from their pores.

Many have argued that due to the sponge’s primitive features, it came first — before the ctenophore, said researchers.

According to the findings, it is determined that while sponges came early, they were likely second to ctenophores.

Scientists in their determination process looked at genes in the chromosomes of the creatures.

The researchers found that the chromosomes of the ctenophore were different from the ones of sponges, jellyfish, and other invertebrates. Finding alerted researchers that the ctenophore could have either come much earlier than the others, or much later

Rokhsar explained that at first, we couldn’t tell if ctenophore chromosomes were different from those of other animals simply because they’d just changed a lot over hundreds of millions of years.”

“Alternatively, they could be different because they branched off first before all other animal lineages appeared. We needed to figure it out.”

The “smoking gun” for researchers was when they drew a comparison of the chromosomes of ctenophores to non-animals.

“When the team compared the chromosomes of these diverse animals and non-animals, they found that ctenophores and non-animals shared particular gene-chromosome combinations, while the chromosomes of sponges and other animals were rearranged in a distinctly different manner,” the release stated.

The new insight is valuable to learn about the basic functions of all animals and humans today, such as how we eat, move, and sense our surrounding environment, remarked the researchers.