Earliest animals lived in a lake environment, rese...( http://www.gps.caltech.edu/people/tbris...)

Date:7/27/2009

"http://www.gps.caltech.edu/people/tbristow/profile">Tom Bristow, who worked in Kennedy's lab. "In rocks of this age, smectite is normally transformed into other types of clay. The smectite in these South China rocks, however, underwent no such transformation and have a special chemistry that, for the smectite to form, requires specific conditions in the water conditions commonly found in salty, alkaline lakes."

The researchers' work involved collecting hundreds of rock samples from several localities in South China, carrying out mineralogical analysis using X-ray diffraction, and collecting and analyzing other types of geochemical data.

"All our analyses show that the rocks' minerals and geochemistry are not compatible with deposition in seawater," Bristow said. "Moreover, we found smectite in only some locations in South China, and not uniformly as one would expect for marine deposits. This was an important indicator that the rocks hosting the fossils were not marine in origin. Taken together, several lines of evidence indicated to us that these early animals lived in a lake environment."

Bristow noted that the new research gives scientists a glimpse into where some of the early animals lived and what the environmental conditions were like for them important information for addressing the broader questions of how and why animals appeared when they did.

"It is most unexpected that these first fossils do not come from marine sediments," Kennedy said. "It is possible, too, that similarly aged or older organisms also existed in marine environments and we have not found them. But at the very least our work shows that the range of early animal habitats was far more expansive than presently assumed and raises the exciting possibility that animal evolution first occurred in lakes and is tied to some environmental aspect unique to lake environments. Furthermore, because lakes are of limited size and not connected to each other,
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Contact: Iqbal Pittalwala iqbal@ucr.edu 951-827-6050 University of California - Riverside Source:Eurekalert

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