Evolutionary Stasis

Creatures who have hardly changed since their earliest fossil discovery.

Cyanobacteria in Stromatolites

Stromatolites are Earth's oldest fossils at 3.5 billion geological years old. They are formed because of blue/green algae. Blue/green algae is a colony of bacteria called cyanobacteria... Each cyanobacterium is highly technical piece of machinery...For movement they secrete fluid and then propel themselves through that fluid...They possess the photosynthesis system...Cyanobacteria are able to reproduce through three known methods which are, -binary fission; budding and fragmentation; each of these methods make use of the highly technical machinery in the cell... Cyanobacteria exist today in wet areas where blue/green alea forms.

The earliest known oxygen-breathing bacteria that lived on land

New University of Alberta research shows the first evidence that the first oxygen-breathing bacteria occupied and lived on land 100 million years earlier than previously thought. The researchers show that the most primitive form of aerobic-respiring life on land came into existence 2.48 billion years ago.

This is a picture of acidic waste water from a modern mining site. It supports the same oxygen using bacterial life that appeared on Earth 2.48 billion years ago.

Sulphur bacteria

Scientists examined sulfur bacteria, microorganisms that are too small to see with the unaided eye, that are 1.8 billion years old and were preserved in rocks from Western Australia's coastal waters. Using cutting-edge technology, they found that the bacteria look the same as bacteria of the same region from 2.3 billion years ago -- and that both sets of ancient bacteria are indistinguishable from modern sulfur bacteria found in mud off of the coast of Chile.

Ciliates

After they die, members of most ciliate species simply disintegrate in their watery environs, leaving behind no fossilized remains....Now, geologists at MIT and Harvard University have found. rare, flask-shaped microfossils dating back 635 to 715 million years, representing the oldest known ciliates in the fossil record. The remains are more than 100 million years older than any previously identified ciliate fossils, and the researchers say the discovery suggests early life on Earth may have been more complex than previously thought....Today these hairy microbes are ubiquitous in marine environments. However, it’s unclear how long ciliates have inhabited Earth:

Galeaplumosus abilus

Hemichordates are known as fossils from at least the earliest mid-Cambrian Period (ca. 510 Ma) and are well represented in the fossil record by the graptolithinid pterobranchs (“graptolites”), which include the most abundantly preserved component of Paleozoic macroplankton [1]. However, records of the soft tissues of fossil hemichordates are exceedingly rare and lack clear anatomical details [2]. Galeaplumosus abilus gen. et sp. nov. from the lower Cambrian of China [ 3], an exceptionally preserved fossil with soft parts, represents by far the best-preserved, the earliest, and the largest hemichordate zooid from the fossil record; it provides new insight into the evolution of the group. The fossil is assigned to the pterobranch hemichordates on the basis of its morphological similarity to extant representatives. It has a zooidal tube (coenecium) with banding throughout comparable to that in the extant pterobranchs and a zooid with paired annulated arms bearing paired rows of annulated tentacles; it also displays a putative contractile stalk. G. abilus demonstrates stasis in pterobranch morphology, mode of coenecium construction, and probable feeding mechanism. It shows little change over 525 million years.

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Stay tuned for many more "Creatures who have hardly changed since their earliest fossil discovery."