27 August 2026
Geochemical clues hint that worm-like creatures in the Ediacaran period benefited from symbiosis with bacteria.
Conotubus spp. was an enigmatic, tube-shaped creature that lived during the Ediacaran period, more than 500 million years ago. Credit: Jihao Li (Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing, China) and James Schiffbauer (University of Missouri, Columbia, MO)
Many animals live in close contact with microorganisms – think of the teeming bacteria in the human gut. Direct evidence of such inter-species partnerships, known as symbioses, in the early fossil record is lacking. Now Zhenfei Wang at Nanjing University in China and colleagues report the earliest known example of this behaviour.
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