A new study in the journal Nature Geoscience claims rocks from South Australia hold fossils of primitive sponges that date back to just after the end of a global ice age known as Snowball Earth. The find pushes the first appearance of simple animal life back some 70 million years and raises questions of how descendants of reef-dwelling sponges survived through such an intense period of worldwide glaciation that ended 555 million years ago.
SOURCES
BBC story
Study abstract
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