Mobile Life Form Evidence Comes from the Strangest Places

The earliest evidence of self-propelled movement by an organism on Earth is pushed back by some fossilized track marks that are said to be 2.1 billion years old with 1.5 billion years.

In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a new researched was published on Monday suggesting that at least 2.1 billion years ago ancient life on Earth had acquired the capacity for self-propelled locomotion compared to the number of years some previous research indicated, 570 million years ago. Locomotion is also known as motility, and the evidence for that comes from ancient sedimentary rocks where tiny fossilized wriggle marks were embedded.

Abderrazak El Albani from CNRS-Université de Poitiers, the lead author of the new study, has discovered nine years ago in 2010 at the Francevillian Basin in the Haut-Ogooué Province of Gabon in central Africa the earliest evidence of complicated multicellular life. The previous benchmark was set 600 million years ago while the new evidence dated to 2.1 billion years old makes them 1.5 billion years older.

The new fossils were discovered at the same place, and the capacity of propelling through organic-rich mud on this shallow seafloor was figured out by ancient life while their evolution began. At least this is what they suggest. The wriggle marks are fossilized and were found, according to the new research, inside of these rocks where there have also been found some tunnels left behind by these primitive creatures as they were trying to find nutrients by squirming. This is the earliest evidence of motility as it has been confirmed.

According to El Albani’s opinion provided in a statement, the galleries of the x-ray images are amazing, spectacular. However, these rocks’ quality is the one we should thank for as it conserved the primitive organisms’ movement.