The First Animal Ever on Earth

Do you ever wonder what the first animal on earth looked like? What did they do? How did they live? Join Stefan Chin for a fun new episode of SciShow that takes you way, way back.

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[asmillingchihuahua]

Guy: Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?

Other guy: Our ancestors?

[austingonzalez]

Excellent video conclusion. It's not the result that matters, but the process and curiosity. Nice.

[culwin]

Have to ask TierZoo.
I think he has a .rom of the unreleased prototype.

[RatzBuddie]

1: Maybe sponges lost their neural structure because they're immobile or comb jellies gained one for movement?
2: Are the neuropeptides too simple for something more complex than comb jellies?

[grenishsinxRgold]

I wonder how heated the fight between the scientists are.. is it just a hot debate, or is it two scientists drawing ruler like swords and battling it out..

[Kassidar]

What's right > Who's right.
If people understood this then arguments wouldn't so often degenerate into fights.

[jayasuryangoral-maanyan]

I really don't see the issue with the nervous system forming twice in animals. The venus fly trap has sodium-potassium channels that allow it to react (I'm pretty sure), and we use those channels in our nervous system. On the other hand bivalves have evolved from animals that had a much more intricate nervous system and barely have any now. I would want to think that sponges and cnitifores shared a common ancestor that had something like the start of a nervous system without synapses (so no acetylcholine etc) and that sponges lost the nervous system. The only issue is that the loose working together of different cells make it so nice to think that early on it was the way that sponges worked that started the animals off.

[alexlandherr]

Somehow “Team Sponge” and “Team Comb Jelly” is way better than than the teams in Twilight...

[z-beeblebrox]

9:50 "CAN YOU DO THAT?!"


NO I CAN'T I'M SORRY I'LL TRY HARDER D, :

[mikemorr]

I would imagine it'd look jellyfish like. I mean, the Man O War isn't actually an animal itself but a bundle of different organisms in a huge symbiotic relationship. So I'd imagine the first animal would be a bundle of different bacteria that joined together into a single organism, becoming an animal in the process.

[dikaiapanoglou]

10:00 "we don't know!" for some reason I laghed, xaxaxa

[architeuthis]

Animals are one thing, but multicellular life in general is big head trip:
When did different kinds of cells start to live together in such a way that they formed a symbiotic relationship so profound that they were able to reproduce in the form of a zygote?

[unknown-fkhk]

So spongebob or the jellyfish he catches

[JohnJohansen]

Now eating my distant relative, the apple.

[XBlondieX]

Videos like this make me wish time travel was a thing. Imagine if we could go back in time to when said first animal existed. Really just imagine getting to see all the bizarre and wonderful creatures that died out long before humans came onto the scene.

[faaaaah]

Thanks for reminding me I can't shimmer magnificently in blues and greens

[Vienna]

Imagine if we could map out all of the quadtrillion+ creatures/beings that has ever existed onto a tree to see every change up to the molecular level giving detailed explanations of each things life

[stove]

Mitochondria evolved from something we'd consider life to something we would not. It doesn't seem that far fetched that sponges would lose their nervous system.

[jerry]

“Strongly disagree” is the equivalent of a political debate in science.

[LEDewey_MD]

Another amazingly well done video! What stands out to me on most of the SciShow videos that I've seen is that the material is not "dumbed down" - accurate and current scientific terms and names are used (even though they are probably over the heads of most lay persons), such as phylum names like Cnidaria, Ctenophora, and all of the subtleties of how these species are different, and how one establishes those differences. Great work!