Earliest Animals May Have Evolved Hundreds of Millions of Years Earlier Than Fossil Record Shows

A new study led by the University of Oxford suggests that the earliest animals may have evolved hundreds of millions of years before their first unmistakable fossils appear in the fossil record. The findings, published in Science Advances, propose that animals may have originated deep in the Neoproterozoic Era, even before some of the most extreme ice ages in Earth's history. Scientists theorize that the animal kingdom may have emerged at the beginning of the Neoproterozoic Era (between 1,000 and 541 million years ago).