Over at Pharyngula, PZ has a nice story about how the Doushantuo fossils (example on right), thought to be cleavage-stage animal embryos from 580 mybp, may in fact be fossilized bacteria (example on left). Check it out.
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There are these fossilized embryos from the Ediacaran, approximately 570 million years ago, that have been uncovered in the Doushantuo formation in China. I've mentioned them before, and as you can see below, they are genuinely spectacular.
Parapandorina raphospissa
But, you know, I work with…
The diagram above shows the early cleavages of the embryo of the scaphopod mollusc, Dentalium. You may notice a few peculiarities: the first cleavage is asymmetric, producing a cell called AB and a larger sister cell, CD. Before the second division, CD makes a large bulge, called a polar lobe,…
I've written about the spectacular phospatized embryos of the Doushantuo formation before. It's a collection of exceptionally well preserved small multicellular organisms, so well preserved that we can even look at cellular organelles. And they're pre-Cambrian, as much as 630 million years old.…
Scanning electron photomicrographs of two fossil embryo specimens from the 600-million-year-old Doushantuo Formation in South China.
From EurekaAlert:
A decade ago, Shuhai Xiao, associate professor of geosciences at Virginia Tech, and his colleagues discovered thousands of 600-million-year-old…