[__ Science __ ] Another transitional fossil fills in an important gap

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Paleontologists Find One-Billion-Year-Old Multicellular Microfossils

Bicellum brasieri, a freshwater protist that lived nearly one billion years ago, had two distinct cell types and could be the earliest multicellular animal ever recorded. Found in the Scottish Highlands, the microfossil reveals a new insight into the transition of single-celled holozoans into more complex multicellular animals.

“We have found a primitive spherical organism made up of an arrangement of two distinct cell types, the first step towards a complex multicellular structure, something which has never been described before in the fossil record,” Professor Wellman said.


“The discovery of this new fossil suggests to us that the evolution of multicellular animals had occurred at least one billion years ago and that early events prior to the evolution of animals may have occurred in freshwater like lakes rather than the ocean.”


“Biologists have speculated that the origin of animals included the incorporation and repurposing of prior genes that had evolved earlier in unicellular organisms,” said Professor Paul Strother, a researcher in the Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences at the Weston Observatory of Boston College.


“What we see in Bicellum brasieri is an example of such a genetic system, involving cell-cell adhesion and cell differentiation that may have been incorporated into the animal genome half a billion years later.”


The findings are published in the journal Current Biology.

 
In order for evolution to be taken seriously on a level other than faith in "he says", "she says" then it must hold up in the fossil record. We only see species specific fossils when there should be millions upon millions of transitional fossils to prove evolution. The transitional fossil record should be overwhelming. Evolutionist get all excited upon even finding a single fossil they can label transitional because they know they have huge gaps in their narrative.
 
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