By Andrew Aloia BBC Sport Last updated on 11 October 2021 11 October 2021 . From the section Football Watson was a trailblazer who helped transform how football was played There are two murals of black footballers facing one another across an alleyway in Glasgow. One helped shape football as we know it, the other is Pele. Andrew Watson captained Scotland to a 6-1 win over England on his debut in 1881. He was a pioneer, the world's first black international, but for more than a century the significance of his achievements went unrecognised. Research conducted over the past three decades has left us with some biographical details: a man descended of slaves and of those who enslaved them, born in Guyana, raised to become an English gentleman and famed as one of Scottish football's first icons. And yet today, 100 years on from his death aged 64, Watson remains something of an enigma, the picture built around him a fractured one. His grainy, faded, sepia image evokes many differen
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The oldest animal life on Earth was discovered in Canada: 890 million years old
A Canadian paleontologist may have found the earliest evidence of life on Earth — and it’s much older than we thought.
a. and b. show the fossils that Turner believes show evidence of sponge life; compared with the spongin skeleton of a modern sponge, shown in c. Image credit: Turner, 2021, Nature CC by 4.0
Life as we know it took a pretty funky turn around 541 million years ago. That’s when a period called the Cambrian emerged, and with it, the so-called Cambrian explosion ushered in practically all major groups of animals. It lasted for about 25 million years and resulted in the divergence of life as we know it.
Before the Cambrian explosion, life on Earth was simple and small. It was composed either of individual cells, or of microscopic, multicellular organisms — or at least so we thought.
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Scientists have found some evidence of animal life existing before the Cambrian. In particular, some sponges (immobile aquatic animals) seem to have emerged before the Cambrian. But how long before it?
According to a recent study, the first sponges emerged a whopping 350 million years before the Cambrian — or 890 million years ago.
“If I’m right, animals emerged long, long before the first appearance of traditional animal fossils,” study author Elizabeth Turner told Nature. “That would mean there’s a deep back history of animals that just didn’t get preserved very well.”
The fossils discovered by Turner, from a remote area of northwestern Canada accessible only by helicopter, resemble some modern sponges known as keratose demosponges. The researchers dated the layer of rocks in which the sponge fossils were found, a solid analysis tool that leaves little room for question regarding the fossils’ age. The identification as sponges also seems pretty clear.
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“This organic skeleton is very characteristic [of sponge fossils],” explained geobiologist Joachim Reitner, who reviewed Turner’s study ahead of publication. “[T]here are not known comparable structures.”
But a finding that would force us to reconsider the evolution of life on Earth won’t happen easily, and Turner’s peers are rightfully raising all sorts of questions regarding the fossils. Some point out that the findings may not be fossils at all (but rather other structures), while others are focusing on another question: if life emerged a few hundred million years before the Cambrian, why haven’t we found any fossils of it until this?
Ultimately, if the finding is confirmed, it will help us understand the evolution of life on Earth.
“We are animals,” Turner said. “And we have a big brain, and we’re capable of wondering about stuff, and we wonder how we came to be.
“What happened before, and what was it like? How did it begin?” she said. “This is really digging into that. I’m shaking up the apple cart.”
Andrei's background is in geophysics, and he's been fascinated by it ever since he was a child. Feeling that there is a gap between scientists and the general audience, he started ZME Science -- and the results are what you see today.
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anthonymaw
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anthonymaw
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By Andrew Aloia BBC Sport Last updated on 11 October 2021 11 October 2021 . From the section Football Watson was a trailblazer who helped transform how football was played There are two murals of black footballers facing one another across an alleyway in Glasgow. One helped shape football as we know it, the other is Pele. Andrew Watson captained Scotland to a 6-1 win over England on his debut in 1881. He was a pioneer, the world's first black international, but for more than a century the significance of his achievements went unrecognised. Research conducted over the past three decades has left us with some biographical details: a man descended of slaves and of those who enslaved them, born in Guyana, raised to become an English gentleman and famed as one of Scottish football's first icons. And yet today, 100 years on from his death aged 64, Watson remains something of an enigma, the picture built around him a fractured one. His grainy, faded, sepia image evokes many differen
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