You probably remember the taxonomy chart from science class (whether or not you can recite it): kingdom, order, phylum, etc. You probably don't remember the tree of life, though, also known as the phylogenetic tree. That's a chart created to try and piece together how species evolved into other species, like a large-scale family tree.
Well, scientists in Norway think they've found something that is further towards the roots of that tree than just about anything else. 20 years ago, a tiny little microorganism was found in a tiny little lake about 30 kilometers south of Oslo. The University of Oslo has been trying to figure out what it is ever since, and they've just concluded that that microorganism is, in fact, mankind's oldest relative. They're giving it a new genus on the taxonomy chart, Collodictyon, and note that of everything that they cross-referenced the organism with over 20 years of searching, they only got a single partial match with something in Tibet. The organism itself hasn't been found anywhere outside that one lake.
The second link in that last paragraph, which goes to Science Daily, will be able to give you the nitty-gritty on what the Collodictyon is made of and all its various parts, as well as its daily life, which basically consists of living in the muck, waiting for some algae to float by, popping up, eating it, and then sinking back into the muck to munch. When they run out of algae, they start eating each other.
I'll leave to you the inevitable humanity's-oldest-relative jokes about who or what else that description might fit.
Sunday, April 29, 2012
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2 comments:
I don't get this. "They're giving it a new genus on the taxonomy chart, Collodictyon, and note that of everything that they cross-referenced the organism with over 20 years of searching, they only got a single partial match with something in Tibet. " Could you please enlighten me on this? I keep following all your posts hope you can regularly post more. I get very useful information here. Thanks for having this.
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As the scientists put it:
"We are surprised. Enormous quantities of environmental samples are taken all over the world. We have searched for the species in every existing DNA database, but have only found a partial match with a gene sequence in Tibet. So it is conceivable that only a few other species exist in this family branch of the tree of life, which has survived all the many hundreds of millions of years since the eukaryote species appeared on Earth for the first time."
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