Scientists discover world’s oldest known animal dating back 558 million years

Scientists have unearthed a mysterious creature that lived half a billion years ago and has been labeled as the Earth’s oldest animal.

Fat molecules of the fossils of the creature, ‘as strange as life on another planet’, were discovered in Russia near the White Sea by Australian National University (ANU). The animal named ‘Dickinsonia’ dates back to some 558 million years ago and was found in a discovery that the scientists are calling ‘the Holy Grail of palaeontology’.

Dickinsonia had an oval, segmented body measuring around 5ft long and had rib-like features all across its body. The animal deprived of physical features including limbs, organs or even a head. As per CNN, the fossil was so well preserved that scientists found striking 93% cholesterol abundance that they have labeled as ‘the hallmark’ of animal life.

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The creature was a part of the ‘Ediacara Biota’ that lived on Earth during a time when bacteria had the superiority, 20 million years earlier to the emergence of modern animal life, a time period known as the ‘Cambrain explosion’, explained South China Morning Post.

Co-author Jochen Brocks of the study published in the journal Science said, “The fossil fat molecules that we’ve found prove that animals were large and abundant 558 million years ago, millions of years earlier than previously thought.

“Scientists have been fighting for more than 75 years over the nature of these bizarre fossils. The fossil fat now confirms Dickinsonia as the oldest known animal fossil, solving a decades-old mystery that has been the Holy Grail of palaeontology,” Brocks added.