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Animal embryos in deep time

Nature volume 391, pages 529–530 (1998)Cite this article

Discoveries of spectacularly preserved embryos and tissues, in rocks that are about 570 million years old, open a new era in the study of early animal evolution.

A spell seems to have been broken — animals considerably older than the Cambrian are finally being found in the fossil record, and they are preserved in a way that reveals details down to the cellular level. This stirring claim is based on studies of the roughly 570-million-year-old Doushantuo phosphorites in southern China, and is hardly weakened by the fact that it comes from two different groups of palaeontologists. On page 553 of this issue1, Xiao et al.report on exquisitely preserved algae and animal embryos from the phosphorites, while, in Science, Li et al.2 describe sponges and animal embryos from the same deposits.

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Figure 1: Timescale of Earth's history (left), and the interval between 1,000 and 480 million years ago (Ma), showing some significant events in the fossil record.

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  1. the Department of Palaeozoology, Swedish Museum of Natural History, Box 50007, Stockholm, S-104 05, Sweden

    Stefan Bengtson

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  1. Stefan Bengtson
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Bengtson, S. Animal embryos in deep time. Nature 391, 529–530 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/35245

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