According to new research, the survival strategies of polar marine creatures may help to explain how the first animals on Earth could have evolved earlier than the oldest fossils suggest. Some of the most extreme, cold and icy periods the world has ever seen may have been the time when these first simple and now extinct animals were living. The study appeared in a journal.
The world came out of a huge ice age just as the fossil record shows the earliest animal life on Earth. Animals must have survived during a time when the planet was covered in ice, when it was larger than any seen before. It would have required similar survival strategies if animal life had arisen before or during these extreme periods.
Over millions of years, the expansion and contraction of the ice sheets has led to the evolution of the unique animals and plant species in the area. It could be the case for the evolution of animal life. The polar regions are ideal for studying the past and the potential for life in the universe beyond our planet, such as on icy moons like Europa.
Some animals in the polar regions are incredibly adapted to life in and around the ice, and how much they can teach us about the evolution and survival of life in the past or Whether it is animals living upside down on the underside of ice instead of the seafloor, sponges living hundreds of kilometers under thick floating ice shelves, organisms that are adapted to live in seawater colder than -2C, or whole communities existing in the darkness on food sources that don't need These cold conditions help to drive ocean circulation, carry oxygen into the ocean depths and make these places more suitable for life.
More than 19 million km 2 of the seas around Antarctica and 15 million km 2 of theArctic Ocean are covered by floating ice. The whole world is believed to have been entombed in ice around a kilometer thick, but there is some evidence that this is true.
There are huge uncertainties about how and where animals evolved due to the fact that there is a huge difference in the timing of the dawn of animal life. Animals would have to contend with extreme environmental pressures, but they may have helped to force life to become more complex to survive.
Huge amounts of ice would have bulldozed the shallows, making them inhospitable to life, and forcing creatures into the deep sea. The safest places for life to evolve are in the deep sea and sheltered areas.
Paleontologists often look to the past to tell them how future climate change might look, but in this case we were looking to the most extreme habitats on the planet to help us.
More information: Animal survival strategies in Neoproterozoic ice worlds, Global Change Biology (2022). DOI: 10.1111/gcb.16393 Journal information: Global Change Biology
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