Fossils Found That Could Be 580 Million Years Old
Posted on: Thursday, 14 February 2008, 06:00 CST
Chinese archaeologists have found a fossilized body of an octoradiate spiral organism dating back 580 million years in the southwestern part of the country, the Guangming Daily reported. The creature in question would have been a multicellular animal.
The fossil was found in Wenghui village, Jiangkou County, in southwest Guizhou Province. It was jointly confirmed as an octoradiate spiral organism by a research team under the Institute of Geology of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences and an expert from Switzerland's National Museum of Natural Sciences.
The fossil is 3 centimeters in diameter and is said to be a 580 million-year-old multicellular animal that belonged to the Sinian Period(800 million years to 570 million years ago).
It was the earliest spiral organism body fossil that has so far been found by scientists, the Guangming Daily said.
The fossil is a new genus and might be the ancestor of coelenterate and spiral organisms. The new finding could provide very important evidence for the comparative study of phosphatized spheroidal fossils dating to the Sinian period and the Ediacaran fauna (635 million years to 543 million years ago), scientists claim.
Source: BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific
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