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1.047 billion years agoReputable source · 2 sourcesWell documented

Bangiomorpha: the first sex, the first true multicellular life

On the timeline · around 1.047 billion years ago · The Boring BillionThe Boring BillionToward the Rise of AnimalsBangiomorpha: the first sex, the first true multicellular life1.3 Ga1.2 Ga1.2 Ga1.1 Ga1.1 Ga1 Ga950 Ma

What happened

In rocks first collected on Baffin and Somerset Islands in Arctic Canada, paleontologist Nicholas Butterfield described a fossil red alga, Bangiomorpha pubescens, built from differentiated filaments of cells rather than a single cell alone, some specialized for spores and others for reproduction. A 2018 re-dating using rhenium-osmium radiometric methods pinned the fossil to 1.047 billion years old, about 150 million years younger than earlier estimates, and McGill University, whose researchers led that dating work, calls Bangiomorpha the oldest known direct ancestor of modern plants and animals. Butterfield's original description argued the fossil's cell differentiation is best explained as evidence of sexual reproduction, the oldest such evidence on record, arising alongside true multicellularity rather than after it.

Why it matters

Nearly all complex life today, plants, animals, fungi, reproduces sexually and builds bodies from many specialized cell types. Bangiomorpha suggests these two traits, sex and true multicellularity, are old partners that arose together rather than separately, more than a billion years before large animals existed to need either one.

How we know

The claim rests on the fossil's own anatomy: distinct cell types arranged in a pattern that matches the reproductive structures of living red algae, not a stray growth form. The refined 1.047-billion-year age comes from dating the volcanic ash layers bracketing the fossil-bearing rock, a more precise method than the broader estimates used when the fossil was first described in 2000.

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Part of a timelineEarly Life on Earth9 events · How a single microbial ancestor became a planet run by oxygen, complex cells, and eventually animals, from LUCA to the doorstep of the Cambrian explosion.View all →
Bangiomorpha: the first sex, the first true multicellular life · Early Life on Earth · SourcedStory