OxfordAnimals may be hundreds of millions of years older than fossils show.
They may have originated before some of Earth’s most extreme ice ages, the Oxford-led study finds.
Mongolia’s Kheseen microfossils are as well preserved as China’s older Weng’an deposit, yet hold no clear animals.
The Tonian-era calibration pushes molecular clock estimates of animal origins earlier than the Ediacaran one.
How each outlet framed it
- Phys.org
- challenges the assumption that exceptional fossil deposits would preserve animals if they existed, proposes they originated in Neoproterozoic before Weng'an
Sources: Phys.org