Earliest known animal might have inflated its body like a balloon

New Scientist

Image:  sharloch

Have we misunderstood the first known animal? Dickinsonia, a weird organism from half a billion years ago, may have inflated its body to feed. The strategy is not seen in animals today, which raises questions about whether Dickinsonia really belongs in the animal kingdom after all.

Dickinsonia is one of a bunch of enigmatic organisms called the Ediacarans that lived a few tens of millions of years before familiar animals like sponges began forming fossils.

The Ediacarans have sometimes been interpreted as a failed evolutionary experiment, unlike anything alive today. But recently palaeontologists have become more confident that they were animals, with Dickinsonia singled out in particular as a candidate for the earliest known animal we have a fossil of.