04 March 2020

New form of life discovered

"The tree of life just got another major branch. Researchers recently found a certain rare and mysterious microbe called a hemimastigote in a clump of Nova Scotian soil. Their subsequent analysis of its DNA revealed that it was neither animal, plant, fungus nor any recognized type of protozoan — that it in fact fell far outside any of the known large categories for classifying complex forms of life (eukaryotes). Instead, this flagella-waving oddball stands as the first member of its own “supra-kingdom” group, which probably peeled away from the other big branches of life at least a billion years ago."
More at Quanta magazine.

1 comment:

  1. Whoa. I was going to make the "Oh fuck, not another phylum" reference, but as it turns out, "kingdom" is even higher up the taxonomic hierarchy of life. That's quite something.

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