First organisms to have had sex discovered

Researchers at Cambridge University believe they have uncovered the first possible example of a complex organism that may have used both sexual and asexual reproduction. But scientists emphasize there are still several links in the evolutionary chain left before they can say for sure that these were the first creatures to ever have sex.

"This would be the first time we've actually got evidence for how large, complicated organisms reproduced, and we believe, one of the oldest ones," Dr. Emily Mitchell, one of the Cambridge researchers, told Deutsche Welle. "So it's the first time that we can say for certain that things weren't just splitting in two and reproducing like that."

The organism is called a "Fractofusus," neither fully plant nor animal, and lived roughly 565 million years ago in the Ediacaran period, in the pre-Cambrian, pre-dinosaur days. Franctofusus falls under the category of "rangeomorphs," plant-like creatures that lived in the sea.

Researchers were able to definitively show that Fractofusus had two forms of reproduction: one was asexual, and similar to how strawberry or spider plants reproduce today.

"But they also had a phase where they could release little bits of themselves into the water, which we refer to as waterborne propogules," said Mitchell. "So these propogules, may have been sexually reproduced, but they also might have just been tiny, tiny little buds or fragments. Unfortunately we can't differentiate between the two."

Clones no more

Fractofusus could grow between a few centimeters and several meters long. Reserachers focused on three areas, called "bedding planes," that contain more than 1,000 specimens of Fractofusus and several other concurrent species, which were discovered off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.

Fractofusus weren't really animals: they didn't move and they didn't have mouths or organs, and they probably absorbed nutrients via osmosis from the water. They also exhibited the same clustering patterns of asexual reproduction that today's modern plants show. But they may have been a precursor to animals.

"We know so little about what these things were," said Mitchell. "We don't even know whether they were ancestors to animals, or whether they were just a totally different off-shoot in a failed attempt of evolution."