Wednesday 31 May 2023

NATURE GAVE US LIFE : Evolution of animals on earth

For many people animals are perhaps the most familiar, and most interesting, of living things which is created by nature. This may be because we are animals ourselves. As such, we have a number of features in common with all the organisms placed in the animal kingdom, and these common features indicate that we have a shared evolutionary history.

All animals and plants are classified as multicellular eukaryotes: their bodies are made up of large numbers of cells, and microscopic inspection of these cells reveals that they contain a nucleus and a number of other organelles. Compared to prokaryotic organisms such as bacteria, plants and animals have a relatively recent evolutionary origin. DNA evidence suggests that the first eukaryotes evolved from prokaryotes, between 2500 and 1000 million years ago. That is, eukaryotes as a taxon date from the Proterozoic Era, the final Era of the Precambrian. Fossils of both simple unicellular and more complex multicellular organisms are found in abundance in rocks from this period of time. In fact, the name "Proterozoic" means "early life".

Plants and animals both owe their origins to endosymbiosis, a process where one cell ingests another, but for some reason then fails to digest it. The evidence for this lies in the way their cells function. Both plant and animal rely on structures called mitochondria to release energy in their cells, using aerobic respiration to produce the energy-carrying molecule ATP. There is considerable evidence that mitochondria evolved from free-living aerobic bacteria: they are the size of bacterial cells; they divide independently of the cell by binary fission; they have their own genome in the form of a single circular DNA molecule; their ribosomes are more similar to those of bacteria than to the ribosomes found in the eukaryote cell's cytoplasm; and like chloroplasts they are enclosed by a double membrane as would be expected if they derived from bacterial cells engulfed by another cell.
Like the plants, animals evolved in the sea. And that is where they remained for at least 600 million years. This is because, in the absence of a protective ozone layer, the land was bathed in lethal levels of UV radiation. Once photosynthesis had raised atmospheric oxygen levels high enough, the ozone layer formed, meaning that it was then possible for living things to venture onto the land.





The oldest fossil evidence of multicellular animals, or metazoans, is burrows that appear to have been made by smooth, wormlike organisms. Such trace fossils have been found in rocks from China, Canada, and India, but they tell us little about the animals that made them apart from their basic shape.

Between 620 and 550 million years ago (during the Vendian Period) relatively large, complex, soft-bodied multicellular animals appear in the fossil record for the first time. While found in several localities around the world, this particular group of animals is generally known as the Ediacaran fauna, after the site in Australia where they were first discovered.

The Ediacaran animals are puzzling in that there is little or no evidence of any skeletal hard parts i.e. they were soft-bodied organisms, and while some of them may have belonged to groups that survive today others don't seem to bear any relationship to animals we know. Although many of the Ediacaran organisms have been compared to modern-day jellyfish or worms, they have also been described as resembling a mattress, with tough outer walls around fluid-filled internal cavities - rather like a sponge.

As a group, Ediacaran animals had a flat, quilted appearance and many showed radial symmetry. They ranged in size form 1cm to >1m, and have been classified into three main groups on the basis of their shape: discoidal, frond-like, or ovate-elongate. The large variety of Ediacaran animals is significant, as it suggests there must have been a lengthy period of evolution prior to their first appearance in the fossil record.
Animals continued to diversify in the Ordovician seas (505 - 440 million years ago). They were mostly invertebrates, including graptolites , which were stick-like branching colonies of tiny animals, together with brachiopods, trilobites, cephalopods, corals, crinoids and conodonts. We now place the conodonts with the chordates, but for a long time they were known only by their tiny, but very common, teeth.





In terms of number of species invertebrates were by far the most common Ordovician animals - as they still are today. However, members of another taxon were also evolving in the Ordovician seas. These were the fish.

Like the conodonts, fish are members of the chordate phylum because they display certain defining characteristics: a dorsal stiffening rod called the notochord, a dorsal nerve cord, pharyngeal gill slits and a tail that extends beyond the anus. However, fish are placed in the subphylum Vertebrata , because they also show the development of skeletal features such as a backbone, skull, and limb bones.
Not all the modern groups of fish were represented in the Ordovician oceans. At this time only the jawless fish had evolved from a chordate ancestor. The sharks and their relatives and two extinct groups, the placoderms (which had bony plates covering their heads) and the acanthodians (the first known jawed vertebrates, with a skeleton of cartilage) made their appearance in the Silurian. However, neither the sharks nor the agnathans became common until the Devonian. The other two living lineages, the ray-finned (e.g. carp and kahawai) and the lobe-finned fish (e.g. lungfish and the coelacanth), evolved during the Devonian period.
Agnathans, or jawless fish, were the earliest fish: an excellent fossil of Haikouichthys ercaicunensis dates back about 530 million years, to the Cambrian. Previously the earliest-known agnathans were dated to around 480 million years ago. Agnathans have traditionally been placed with the vertebrates due to the presence of a skull, although the modern forms such as hagfish lack a vertebral column. The earliest agnathans were Ostracoderms. They were bottom-feeders and were almost entirely covered in armour plates. When the sharks and bony fish began to evolve, around 450 million years ago, most ostracoderms became extinct. Only the lineage that produced the modern hagfish and lampreys survived.

By the Devonian period two major animal groups dominated the land: the tetrapods (4-legged terrestrial vertebrates) and the arthropods, including arachnids and wingless insects. The first tetrapods were amphibians, such as Ichthyostega, and were closely related to a group of fish known as lobe-finned fish e.g. Eusthenopteron . Once thought to be extinct, the coelacanth is a living representative of this group.




Eusthenopteron had a number of exaptations that pre-adapted it to life on land: it had limbs (with digits) that allowed it to move around on the bottom of pools, lungs - which meant it could gulp air at the surface, and the beginnings of a neck. This last is important as a terrestrial predator cannot rely on water current to bring food into its mouth, but must move its head to catch prey. And the bones in Eusthenopteron's fins are almost identical to those in the limbs of the earliest amphibians, an example of homology.

Ichthyostega's skull was almost identical to that of the lobe-finned fish Eusthenopteron, a definite neck separated its body from its head, and it retained a deep tail with fins. While Ichthyostega had four strong limbs, the form of its hind legs suggests that it did not spend all its time on land.


All modern tetrapods have a maximum of 5 digits on each limb, and are thus said to have a pentadactyl limb. For a long time scientists believed that pentadactyly was the ancestral state for tetrapods. However, careful examination of the fossils of early amphibians such as Ichthyostega and Acanthostega has revealed the presence of up to 8 toes on each foot!

In addition, these early amphibians were large-bodied animals with strong bodies and prominent ribs - quite different in appearance from modern representatives such as frogs and axolotls.
It was originally believed that the tetrapods evolved during periods of drought, when the ability to move between pools would be an advantage. The animals would also have been able to take advantage of terrestrial prey, such as arthropods. Juvenile animals could avoid predation by the land-based adults by living in shallow water.

However, fossil and geological evidence tells us that the early tetrapods lived in lagoons in tropical regions, so that drought was not an issue. They were unlikely to be feeding on land: arthropods are small and fast-moving, unlikely prey for large, sluggish amphibians. But amphibians that laid their eggs on land, rather than in water, would be at a selective advantage, avoiding predation by aquatic vertebrates (such as other amphibians and fish) on gametes, eggs and hatchlings.

Even today some amphibians e.g. the Eleutherodactylid frogs of Australia and Indonesia lay their eggs in soil on the land. However, they must still be in a moist environment, and the size of the egg is restricted to less than 1.5cm in diameter. This is because the egg is dependent on diffusion alone for gas exchange, and means that the embryo must develop rapidly into a food-seeking larval form rather than undergo prolonged development within the egg.

In the Devonian seas, brachiopods had become a dominant invertebrate group, while the fish continued to evolve, with sharks becoming the dominant marine vertebrates. The placoderms and acanthodian fish were quite diverse during the Devonian, but their numbers then dwindled rapidly and both groups became extinct by the end of the Carboniferous period. Lobe-finned fish also peaked in numbers during the Devonian.


One of the greatest evolutionary innovations of the Carboniferous period (360 - 268 million years ago) was the amniotic egg, which allowed early reptiles to move away from waterside habitats and colonise dry regions. The amniotic egg allowed the ancestors of birds, mammals, and reptiles to reproduce on land by preventing the embryo inside from drying out, so eggs could be laid away from the water. It also meant that in contrast to the amphibians the reptiles could produce fewer eggs at any one time, because there was less risk of predation on the eggs. Reptiles don't go through a larval food-seeking stage, but undergo direct development into a miniature adult form while in the egg, and fertilisation is internal.

The earliest date for development of the amniotic egg is about 320 million years ago. However, reptiles didn't undergo any major adaptive radiation for another 20 million years. Current thinking is that these early amniotes were still spending time in the water and came ashore mainly to lay their eggs, rather than to feed. It wasn't until the evolution of herbivory that new reptile groups appeared, able to take advantage of the abundant plant life of the Carboniferous.

Early reptiles belonged to a group called the cotylosaurs. Hylonomus and Paleothyris were two members of this group. They were small, lizard-sized animals with amphibian-like skulls, shoulders, pelvis and limbs, and intermediate teeth and vertebrae. The rest of the skeleton was reptilian. Many of these new "reptilian" features are also seen in little, modern, amphibians (which may also have direct-developing eggs laid on land e.g. New Zealand's leiopelmid frogs, so perhaps these features were simply associated with the small body size of the first reptiles.

A major transition in the evolution of life occurred when mammals evolved from one lineage of reptiles. This transition began during the Permian (286 - 248 million years ago), when the reptile group that included Dimetrodon gave rise to the "beast-faced" therapsids. (The other major branching, the "lizard-faced" sauropsids, gave rise to birds and modern reptiles). These mammal-like reptiles in turn gave rise to the cynodonts e.g. Thrinaxodon during the Triassic period.



This lineage provides an excellent series of transitional fossils. The development of a key mammalian trait, the presence of only a single bone in the lower jaw (compared to several in reptiles) can be traced in the fossil history of this group. It includes the excellent transitional fossils, Diarthrognathus and Morganucodon, whose lower jaws have both reptilian and mammalian articulations with the upper. Other novel features found in this lineage include the development of different kinds of teeth (a feature known as heterodonty), the beginnings of a secondary palate, and enlargement of the dentary bone in the lower jaw. Legs are held directly underneath the body, an evolutionary advance that occurred independently in the ancestors of the dinosaurs.

The end of the Permian was marked by perhaps the greatest mass extinction ever to occur. Some estimates suggest that up to 90% of the species then living became extinct. (Recent research has suggested that this event, like the better-known end-Cretaceous event, was caused by the impact of an asteroid.) During the subsequent Triassic period (248 - 213 million years ago), the survivors of that event radiated into the large number of now-vacant ecological niches.

However, at the end of the Permian it was the dinosaurs, not the mammal-like reptiles, which took advantage of the newly available terrestrial niches to diversify into the dominant land vertebrates. In the sea, the ray-finned fish began the major adaptive radiation that would see them become the most species-rich of all vertebrate classes.

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