All Humans Carry Crucial Genes From 'Sea Monsters' That Lived 500 Million Years Ago, Claim Researchers

Long before the age of dinosaurs, Earth’s oceans were teeming with lifeforms that defied imagination. These were not anything like modern animals—no heads, no legs, no eyes as we know them. Picture creatures shaped like pinwheels, leaves, teardrops, and twisted ropes drifting across the seafloor. In the foreign landscape of the Ediacaran Period, over 500 million years ago, these sea creatures roamed the dark abyss of the seas. In a groundbreaking discovery, scientists have revealed that some of these ancient creatures, bizarre, headless sea monsters, may have passed down crucial genes that first emerged in animals that lived half a billion years ago, as per Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Scott Evans, a postdoctoral researcher at Virginia Tech and lead author of the study, remarked, "These animals are super weird, and they don't look like what we expect animals should look like." The study focused on four extinct species from the Ediacaran Period, a time when the earliest multicellular animals emerged. Fossils of these creatures—Dickinsonia, Kimberella, Tribrachidium, and Ikaria—were deeply analysed and studied from sites in the Australian Outback, according to Live Science.

Despite their simple appearances, scientists found stunning evidence that these creatures were more than just primitive blobs, for instance, take Dickinsonia, for instance—a veiny, oval-shaped organism with a symmetrical body. Or Kimberella, a teardrop-shaped animal assumed to have had a gut and mobility. As if this were not enough, there is Tribrachidium, an immobile creature moulded like a pinwheel, and Ikaria, a worm-like genus discovered with the help of Evans himself. All four possessed signs of body segmentation and bilateral symmetry—traits that in present-day are regulated by advanced regulatory genes, according to Nature World News.

Evans said, "Developmental biologists have learned that everything with a front and a back, or a left and a right, is using the same genetic elements to establish a front and a back or a left and a right…We can use that fact to say that if these Ediacaran animals have these same characteristics, then they are probably controlled by the same genes." These genes—known as high-level regulatory genes—are the master controllers of development. They make the major decisions of what becomes a head, what becomes a tail, and even where organs go.

The implications are whopping. The ability to form sensory organs, immune systems, and even nervous tissue may have originated with these long-extinct animals. "The fact that we can say these genes were operating in something extinct for half a billion years is fascinating to me," stated the University of California. Moreover, co-author Mary Droser of the University of California said they were the architects of all animals that came after them. Droser remarked, "Our work is a way to put these animals on the tree of life, in some respects… And show they’re genetically linked to modern animals, and to us." So next time you look in the mirror, remember that inside us lives the legacy of creatures older than time itself.