Brachiopods living today, such as Lingula, look more or less the same as their Cambrian counterparts from about 500 million years ago! They are considered the oldest known animal (genus) that still contains living representatives.
The goblin shark, duck-billed platypus, lungfish, tadpole shrimp, cockroach, coelacanths and the horseshoe crab — these creatures are famous in the world of biology, because they look as though they stopped evolving long ago. To use a term introduced by Charles Darwin in 1859, they are “living fossils”.
Oldest living creature on Earth identified, emerging 700 million years ago. Scientists have announced that the oldest living creature on our planet is a jellyfish-like organism called a ctenophore. It evolved from the same primordial animals that humans did.
Although it can be hard to tell exactly how old some species are and scientists are confident that they still haven't uncovered nearly all the fossils that could be found, most scientists agree that the oldest living species still around today is the horseshoe crab.
However, using information gathered by paleontologists and the history of evolution, it's been estimated that 99.9% of all species are extinct. That's not all of the species living here on the Planet today. It's actually of all the species who have lived on Earth at all.
Tardigrades are among the most resilient animals known, with individual species able to survive extreme conditions – such as exposure to extreme temperatures, extreme pressures (both high and low), air deprivation, radiation, dehydration, and starvation – that would quickly kill most other known forms of life.
The 'immortal' jellyfish, Turritopsis dohrnii
To date, there's only one species that has been called 'biologically immortal': the jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii. These small, transparent animals hang out in oceans around the world and can turn back time by reverting to an earlier stage of their life cycle.
The First Animals
Sponges were among the earliest animals. While chemical compounds from sponges are preserved in rocks as old as 700 million years, molecular evidence points to sponges developing even earlier.
The first animal to make an orbital spaceflight around the Earth was the dog Laika, aboard the Soviet spacecraft Sputnik 2 on 3 November 1957.
Humans have never stopped evolving and continue to do so today. Evolution is a slow process that takes many generations of reproduction to become evident. Because humans take so long to reproduce, it takes hundreds to thousands of years for changes in humans to become evident.
Broadly speaking, evolution simply means the gradual change in the genetics of a population over time. From that standpoint, human beings are constantly evolving and will continue to do so long as we continue to successfully reproduce.
Before the dinosaurs, the dominant forms of life on land and sea were the synapsids — a group also known as “proto-mammals.” Learn about some of the strangest and most ferocious synapsids and how these unusual creatures evolved into mammals like us.
Laika, a Moscow street dog, became the first creature to orbit Earth, but she died in space.
It's believed that the Sputnik's cooling system did not function properly during her flight. She died from overheating in the ship during the launch process. Laika's body was also never recovered, as the ship was destroyed as it re-entered the earth's atmosphere.
It is called Miacis, the genus that became the ancestor of the animals known today as canids: dogs, jackals, wolves, and foxes. Miacis did not leave direct descendants, but doglike canids evolved from it. By about 30 to 40 million years ago Miacis had evolved into the first true dog—namely, Cynodictis.
According to the Bible, dinosaurs must have been created by God on the sixth day of creation. Genesis 1:24 says, “And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.”
One of the earliest known humans is Homo habilis, or “handy man,” who lived about 2.4 million to 1.4 million years ago in Eastern and Southern Africa.
Adam is the name given in Genesis 1-5 to the first human. Beyond its use as the name of the first man, adam is also used in the Bible as a pronoun, individually as "a human" and in a collective sense as "mankind".
Regenerating flatworms
This apparently limitless regeneration also applies to aging and damaged tissue, allowing the worms to cheat death indefinitely, according to a study at the University of Nottingham.
Among those humans made immortal were Amphiaraus, Ganymede, Ino, Iphigenia, Menelaus, Peleus, and a great number of those who fought in the Trojan and Theban wars. Some were considered to have died and been resurrected before they achieved physical immortality.
Lithobates catesbeianus is an animal that cannot sleep.
Dolphins
Dolphins are well known to be one of the most intelligent species on the planet. They are highly capable of both learning and mimicry.
Plants rule the planet—at least in terms of sheer mass. Many tallies of Earth's life use biodiversity as a measurement and simply count the number of species.
During the launch, her pulse shot up to three times its normal rate and she was so terrified that it remained elevated for an extended time. Temperatures inside the tiny spacecraft quickly soared, and within hours, she cooked to death—all alone and in severe pain.