You must’ve been having some great sex in your life if scientists can still find fossilized evidence of it more than half a billion years later. That’s exactly what happened after researchers studying ancient fossils in Canada’s Northwest Territories uncovered the oldest known evidence of animals reproducing sexually, pushing the origins of animal sex back roughly 5 to 10 million years earlier than previously believed.
Publishing their findings in Science Advances, the researchers from the American Museum of Natural History say the fossils were discovered in 567-million-year-old rock formations from the Ediacaran Period. Scientists believe clusters of a genus called Funisia reproduce by releasing sperm and eggs into the ocean during mass spawning events, turning the oceans into a kind of deep-sea orgy.
Picture an Uncrustable Capable of Having Sex. You’re Welcome.
Before this, life on Earth mostly reproduced asexually, a process in which creatures essentially make copies of themselves. But then creatures figured out that genetic diversification is the better way to build a species long-term, so they started mixing their DNA, speeding up evolution in the process.
The same fossil site also contained other weirdo early animals, including Dickinsonia, an appropriate name given the subject matter. It unfortunately does not look as phallic as it sounds like it would. It’s a flat, mouthless creature that looks like an Uncrustable that was capable of having sex. They also found evidence of a Kimberella, one of the earliest known animals capable of movement.
The researchers say the discovery suggests that some of our biggest early evolutionary leaps likely happened in deep, stable ocean environments before moving into shallow coastal waters and eventually spilling out onto land.
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