Showing posts with label
Last Universal Common Ancestor.
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Showing posts with label
Last Universal Common Ancestor.
Show all posts
Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
- All life on Earth can be traced back to a Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA.
- A study suggests that this organism likely lived on Earth only 400 million years after its formation.
- Further analysis also shows that this life form likely sported an early immune system, which means it was probably fighting off viruses.
Life on Earth had to begin somewhere, and scientists think that “somewhere” is LUCA—or the Last Universal Common Ancestor. True to its name, this prokaryote-like organism represents the ancestor of every living thing, from the tiniest of bacteria to the grandest of blue whales.
Life on Earth had to begin somewhere, and scientists think that “somewhere” is LUCA—or the Last Universal Common Ancestor. True to its name, this prokaryote-like organism represents the ancestor of every living thing, from the tiniest of bacteria to the grandest of blue whales.
While the Cambrian Explosion kickstarted complex life in a major way some 530 million years, the true timeline of life on Earth is much longer. For years, scientists have estimated that LUCA likely arrived on the scene some 4 billion years, which is only 600 million years after the planet’s formation.
But a study from an international team of scientists pushes that timeline back even further to some 4.2 billion years ago, while also discovering some fascinating details about what life for LUCA might’ve been like. The results of the study were published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
