{"id":750425,"date":"2026-06-20T23:32:39","date_gmt":"2026-06-20T23:32:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/750425\/"},"modified":"2026-06-20T23:32:39","modified_gmt":"2026-06-20T23:32:39","slug":"earths-early-life-was-terrible-at-sex-say-scientists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/750425\/","title":{"rendered":"Earth\u2019s early life was terrible at sex, say scientists"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earth\u2019s first animals weren\u2019t great at reproduction, scientists have revealed. In fact, they were so bad at it that life\u2019s diversity was actually held back for millions of years. It was only when stress and competition led to the arrival of sexual reproduction that the pace of evolution<\/a> increased.<\/p>\n

For the study, researchers from the University of Cambridge studied fossils<\/a> from the oldest-known animals on Earth, which lived around 574 million years ago. These animals reproduced asexually, creating offspring from only a single parent\u2019s genes.<\/p>\n

Reported in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution<\/a>, the new study goes some way to explaining a question palaeontologists have long been asking: why animal life remained relatively unchanged on Earth for millions of years.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some of the earliest creatures were Fractofusus (though they looked more like ferns than animals) which existed during the Ediacaran period between 635 and 539 million years ago.<\/p>\n

They didn\u2019t appear to have mouths, organs or limbs, but are believed to have absorbed nutrients from the water around them. They reproduced asexually by sending out clones via runners \u2013 just like modern strawberry plants do.<\/p>\n

\u201cLife was pretty nice during the Ediacaran, so the need for sex<\/a> was rather limited,\u201d says lead author Dr Emily Mitchell<\/a> from Cambridge\u2019s Department of Zoology. \u201cThere was relatively little competition, so there was no real pressure to change anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mitchell and her team studied fossils from Mistaken Point in Newfoundland, one of the world\u2019s richest sources of fossils from the Ediacaran era.<\/p>\n

They built a computer model to simulate how animal communities might have behaved under certain conditions and used it to examine why early animal communities had relatively few species.<\/p>\n

\"IllustrationThe first multicellular organisms appeared on the ocean floor around 600 million years ago – Credit: Getty<\/p>\n

Animals during the Ediacaran period lived in rich waters, where competition for resources was limited. As they spread from the deep ocean to shallower areas of water, they would have faced more pressures, including tides, storms, shifting temperatures and changing nutrient levels.<\/p>\n

\u201cStress essentially leads to sexual reproduction, and when that happens, we can see a massive increase in dispersal distances as animals attempt to colonise new areas due to an increase in competition,\u201d says Mitchell.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As these animals adapted to new habitats and new modes of reproduction, diversification of species increased too. This process accelerated further in the following Cambrian period, when animals became mobile.<\/p>\n

Read more: <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Earth\u2019s first animals weren\u2019t great at reproduction, scientists have revealed. In fact, they were so bad at it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":750426,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[49,48,66],"class_list":["post-750425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/750425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=750425"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/750425\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/750426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=750425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=750425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=750425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}