Giant Single Cell Organism
They are giant, and they roll across the ocean floor leaving a trail behind them. When I say they are giant they are the size of a largish grape. What makes the grape size giant is that they are single cell organisms!
A distant relative of microscopic amoebas, the grape-sized Gromia sphaerica was discovered once before, lying motionless at the bottom of the Arabian Sea. But when Mikhail Matz of the University of Texas at Austin and a group of researchers stumbled across a group of G. sphaerica off the coast of the Bahamas, the creatures were leaving trails behind them up to 50 centimeters (20 inches) long in the mud. (From Discover.com)
Over on Dawkins’s web page they are thinking that if these critters existed in the past we now have to reinterpret the fossil record and look for the types of signs that these giant left on the sea bottom.
“There’s a 1.8 billion-year-old fossil in the Stirling formation in Australia that looks just like one of their traces, and with a discoidal body impression similar to these guys.” Matz said. “We haven’t proved anything, but we might be looking at the ultimate living macroscopic fossil.”
That is the power of the scientific theory at work. New discovery occurs. Reexamine it’s impact on previous theories! Awesome.
