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It’s been an interesting year for VITALS. Not only have scientists affirmed that our gut bacteria can affect our moods, and perhaps even direct our appetites, now there’s news almost equally startling.
In my 2002 novel, our intrepid hero discovers an ancient life form on the sea bed:
“The earliest known large fossils, from tens of millions of years before there were shelly or bony animals, are either lumpy bacterial colonies called stromatolites, or the peculiar formations that Adolf Seilacher named the Vendobionts. Another group name is Ediacara, from the Australian outcropping where type specimens were first found. These ancient life-forms had sat on the floors of shallow seas about six hundred million years ago. All they had left behind were sandy casts, impressions, little more than ghosts in stone. Until now.
“I noted large chambers arranged radially or in grids, some rooted, some floating just above the seafloor. Mushroomlike bells; graceful, waving fronds; jointed blades; gelatinous air mattresses spreading over the silt.”
And now, the journal PLOS One announces the discovery of a deep-sea organism with remarkable similarities to the Ediacara!
Take a look at a BBC report: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29054889