This study was selected as one of the Science’s 2024 Breakthroughs of the Year.
All complex life on Earth, including diverse animals, land plants, macroscopic fungi and seaweeds, are multicellular eukaryotes. Therefore, multicellularity is key for eukaryotes to acquire organismal complexity and large size, and often regarded as one major transition in Earth’s life history by scientists. However, it is still poorly understood when eukaryotes first evolved this innovation in their deep evolutionary history.
A research team from NGIPAS published their latest research finding of ~1.63-billion-year-old multicellular fossils from North China in the prestigious journal Science Advances on January 24th, 2024.
These exquisitely preserved microfossils were considered as currently the oldest record of multicellular eukaryotes. The study is another breakthrough after their finding of decimeter-sized eukaryotic fossils in the Yanshan area, North China, and extends back the emergence of multicellularity in eukaryotes by about 70 million years.
At present, the oldest unambiguous eukaryotic fossils are unicellular forms from late Paleoproterozoic sediments (~1.65 billion years ago) in North China and Northern Australia. Qingshania appeared only slightly later than them, indicating eukaryotes acquired simple multicellularity very early in their evolutionary history. As eukaryotic algae (Archaeplastids) originated after the last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA), the discovery of Qingshania further supports the early appearance of LECA in late Paleoproterozoic (which is consistent with many molecular clock studies), rather than at late Mesoproterozoic of about 1 billion years ago, if Qingshania was truly algal in nature.
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