Rare Microbes Lead Scientists to Discover New Branch on the Tree of Life
17 replies, posted
https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/hemimastigotes-supra-kingdom-1.4715823
"They represent a major branch… that we didn't know we were missing," said Dalhousie biology professor Alastair Simpson, Eglit's supervisor and co-author of the new study.
"There's nothing we know that's closely related to them."
In fact, he estimates you'd have to go back a billion years — about 500 million years before the first animals arose — before you could find a common ancestor of hemimastigotes and any other known living things.
Bet it was unthawed from the Arctic Ices, it will become our new hemimastigote overlords.
Damn, imagine scooping up some dirt on a hike and getting the best look at an organism that scientists have grappled to understand for a century.
Really makes you wonder just how much there is out there that we don't know. Science rules.
it does give us hope that alien lifeforms won't be completely destructive to earth if something nearly totally alien to us can coexist here.
"When exposed to sunlight they grow biomass out through photosynthesis. In a few short years they will blanketting most of the tropics around the equator."
Cellular life is far more diverse, complex, and resilient than we could have ever expected. The more we study bacteria and their ilk, the more we realize just how little we know about not just the world around us, but also the universe at large.
I have troubling following your train of thought. How does this tell us anything about how possible alien lifeforms would affect earth's environment? These things have always been there, we just did not know that their evolutionary branch existed. They have coexisted with everything else on this earth for several hundred million years.
it's things like these that make you realize you actually don't know a fucking thing lmao
Makes me wonder if organisms from space landed here and have yet to evolve. After all, life started out as organisms.
We've got one in the White House.
How outrageously exciting, hopefully within a decade there will be a high quality video documentary about them with an individual who has a soothing voice.
By definition it's not alien, though. We're technically still related to it.
I did say nearly alien. these things are so far the most distantly related things we are aware of, we're more closely related to fungus than them according to this article.
Man I read that as Orgasms but the sentence still made sense.
I too cannot wait for it to be a Venom Symbiote while simultaneously being the secret to genetically engineering catgirls while taking over an arctic station and implanting itself inside of people's ribcages while traveling in spores across the cosmos to contaminate planets while being controlled by a marker.
Doubt it, it was found here in Nova Scotia not really far north.
Nothing exists out there that doesn't want to either consume you alive or enslave you.
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