What did animals eat around 550 million years ago? New study may have answers

A new study conducted by an international team of researchers may have cracked the secret regarding the diet of Earth’s oldest animals. The analysis of a fossil of Ediacaran biota, which is around 550 million years old, found traces of food which were consumed around 538 to 635 million years ago by animals. According to findings published in the Current Biology journal, the ancient fossil contained components of algae and bacteria generally found at the floor of an ocean.

Study co-author Prof Jochen Brocks, of the Australian National University, explained that the fossils used in the study were “some of the most important fossils in evolution because it’s the first time that life became big. They’re the oldest big fossils you can see with your eyes.”

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“Having a gut is very modern,” Brocks. Sponges, corals and jellyfish [for example], they do not have a normal gut that goes through the entire body,” he added according to The Guardian.

The fossils were part of a collection belonging to the main author of the study - Dr Ilya Bobrovskiy of GFZ-Potsdam – who found it in Russia. The Ediacaran biota “already contained some of the creatures that gave rise to the [Cambrian] explosion, to the rise of modern animals”, according to Bobrovskiy.

The study also supported a similar observation from scientists who found a network of modern sponges in rock samples going back almost 890 million years. While the dietary details were not included in the previous study, the observations regarding the species of existing animals are quite similar.