After day after day of efforts, paleontologist Yin Zongjun spent 8 years to find 600 million-year-old sponge fossils in tons of sand.
He said the world's only isolated sponge specimen suggests that Guizhou may be the first place on Earth to appear animals.
Image source: Guizhou Daily Contemporary Media Group official account @ Tianyan News
So what is a sponge fossil?
Ancient sponge fossils refer to a type of sponge fossil found by archaeologists on a reef in the southern waters of Australia, and studies have shown that these sponges lived between 640 and 650 million years ago, and are the earliest animal fossils found on Earth to date.
Sponge is not an item used but an animal?
Sponge has no mouth, no digestive cavity, and no central nervous system, is the most primitive multicellular animal, 600 million years ago has lived in the ocean, has developed to more than 10,000 species, accounting for 1/15 of the marine animal species, is a huge "family".
Except for spongilla, about 20 species of spongilla are freshwater, all of which are distributed in the intertidal zone of the ocean to a depth of 8500 meters (more than 28000 feet), and they are stationary.
It is also the most structured multicellular animal in the world, with no head, no tail, no trunk, no limbs, and no nerves and organs.
The main components of sponge cells are calcium carbonate or silicon carbonate and a large amount of collagen.
In waters with strong currents, sponges are generally less than 2.5 cm tall, and the surface of sponges forms many streamlined lines, an evolution that avoids being broken by waves and currents.
Some sponges prefer to burrow, burrowing holes in the shells of abalone and oysters and then settling on their shells.
Sponges come in a variety of sizes, from a few grams to a large one of 45 kilograms, with the largest span of 4.2 meters.
The color of the sponge is also colorful, their shape varies greatly, and the monomer is generally angled cone, disc-shaped, goblet-shaped, spherical and so on.
Although the sponge belongs to animals, it cannot walk on its own, but can only attach to the reef fixed to the seabed, obtaining food from the sea water flowing around it, and most sponges live on the substrate of hard rock.
Our commonly used sponge cleaning items are made of xylembon fibers or foamed plastic polymers.
There are also natural sponges made from sponge animals, most of which are used for body cleansing or painting.
After reading this article, will you unconsciously pick up the sponge at home and study it?
Source: Baidu Hotspot @ CCTV/Baidu
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