VIDEO 2 min. 23 sec.
Of the 5,000 (some say up to 10,000) species of sponges considered to have been identified, the above is just one example of the diversity within the Porifera phylum, the elephant ear sponge.
“Sponges are the simplest form of multi-cellular animals,” according to tolweb.org. Scientists have classified sponges in the phylum porifera, meaning “pore-bearer,” according to Wikipedia.
Taking their food from single-celled algae and bacteria, there should be emphasis on the “multi-celled” nature of the sponge in evaluating its place in Earth’s life tree. While MIT has now placed them, in the following video and article, as more ancient than algae, scientists realize that much information must be filled in to obtain a more complete picture of the earliest life forms.
It should also be noted that we are speaking of a trace of a molecule here, and the groundbreaking research is so fundamental that it deals with life forms whose taxonomy appears not formally developed into the believed common scheme. The close relatives of sponges being examined in the MIT study seem to diverge from the taxonomic ranking in a not fully proven manner, pictured as an estimated scheme labeled by Science15.com from a Wikipedia table, as follows:
The above is an approximation taken from a Wikipedia graph.
So, it should be visualized that the example related species in our diagram above, Capsaspora owczarzaki, is microscopic, and looks like this:
In this video, and the ensuing article from MIT on the next page, sponges are said to have left fossil evidence considered to be 100 years before the Cambrian period, i.e., 640 million years ago. It is well to remember that the evidence is microscopic, analyzed at a molecular level.
Featured image: By Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE (Elephant Ear Sponge (Ianthella basta)), via Wikimedia Commons
To read the companion article from MIT on this subject, visit the next page.
