Jellies Older Than Sponges
 

https://www.sciencedaily.com...

..."In 2008, one of the early phylogenomic studies fingered the comb jellies (aka ctenophores) as the earliest members of the animal kingdom, rather than sponges.....

...In this fashion, they determined that comb jellies have considerably more genes which support their "first to diverge" status in the animal lineage than do sponges."...

ebuc

This is fascinating r6. Thank you. I didn't know this before.

..."Near the end of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, the Time Traveller finds himself on a desolate beach in the distant future. Under a lurid red sky, by a slack, oily sea, he is set upon by giant crabs, last survivors in a dying world – ‘foul, slow-stirring monsters’, with ‘vast, ungainly claws smeared with an algal slime’.



....If Wells were writing that scene today, the jellyfish would be a much better candidate than the crab for the part of the doomsday creature on the terminal beach. According to Lisa-Ann Gershwin’s disturbing book, the jellyfish is an ‘angel of death’, a harbinger of ‘planetary doom’ likely to be

the ‘last man standing’ in what she describes as our ‘gelatinous future’."...


https://fabiusmaximus.com/2014/03/05...n-death-65518/
https://fabiusmaximus.files.wordpres...pg?w=300&h=187

Wow, very cool.

I made a thread on JellyFish here earlier in the year.

They are beautiful and amazing creatures.