Discovery of the oldest evidence of motility on Earth

This article is not to be confused with the earliest life forms. What is amazing is this multi-cellular creature was mobile and moved through the mud leaving a trail that could be studied 2.1 billion years later. The old findings said this only started around 570 million years ago..

A few years ago, geologist Abderrazak El Albani and his team at the Institut de chimie des milieux et matériaux de Poitiers (CNRS/Université de Poitiers) discovered the oldest existing fossils of multicellular organisms in a deposit in Gabon. Located in the Franceville Basin, the deposit allowed scientists to re-date the appearance of multicellular life on Earth to 2.1 billion years—approximately 1.5 billion years earlier than previously thought (600 million). At the time, the researchers showed that this rich biodiversity co-occurred with a peak in dioxygenation of the atmosphere, and developed in a calm and shallow marine environment.

In this same geological deposit, the team has now uncovered the existence of fossilised traces of motility. This shows that certain multicellular organisms in this primitive marine ecosystem were sophisticated enough to move through its mud, rich in organic matter.

phys.org...

Like the body in the bog but with a tail rudder. Fossils can be fantastic but are we reading them right . S&f bra

a reply to: scubagravy

Your post is gold to me. I have a visual impairment that makes things I am not aware of morph into multiple things in a split second. My brain runs through a checklist of all the possibilities, until fits something that is familiar or makes sense to my brain.

Example: My mother was cutting grass yesterday, so she took down the dog line and placed it on the porch. When I walked onto the porch all I saw was heap of something gray. My brain made it a pile of rocks, since a pile of rocks on the porch made no since, it made it a pile of clothes, that made no sense, so it made it a rug. I have no rug that color so I had to walk over to it, only then did my brain recognize it for the gathered up lead.

My point is that we only know what we know after we have created it in our minds and accept it as true.