Giovanni Mussini et al.
The discovery can change the way we conceive of the Cambrian period and the species that lived about 500 million years ago.
A team of researchers analyzed fossils of the Cambrian period, which took place about 500 million years ago, and reached a surprising conclusion: thin discoveries of revealing shale with the shale – which indicates that it indicates that it indicates that it indicates that it indicates that it indicates that it indicates that it The rocks formed from the mud that dried in the sun.
That is, even if for a short period of times, these first beings on Earth could live out of water.
“They must have had mechanisms to deal with some of the stress factors of this environment,” researcher Giovanni Mussini says. “There was already a set of genetic and physiological tools to make these brief excursions to very terrestrial environments.”
O, published in Palaeontologyhe focused on sedimentary rocks of Pika formation at Jasper National Park in Canada, which had been collected for over two decades, but had never studied them.
“All we can say, at least from the tests I saw, is sometimes exposed,” says Mussini. “Sometimes, if not most of the time, I would say it was under water. ”
“The animals at this time were not confined to these deep water environments,” he explains. “Some of them already had physiological tolerances and environmental that allowed them to approach exposed environments ”.
So far, it was believed that plants and animals have only begun to live permanently on land in the periods Silurian and Devonian, tens of millions of years later.
However, new studies have suggested that this may not be true – and this points in that direction.
“We don’t really know what was going on near the coast,” concludes Mussini, but these findings may be changing the way we conceive the Cambrian period and the species that lived there.
