Gesundheit!
Canadian researchers have discovered a new kind of organism that's so different from other living things that it doesn't fit into the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, or any other kingdom used to classify known organisms. Two species of the microscopic organisms, called hemimastigotes, were found in dirt collected on a whim during a hike in Nova Scotia by Dalhousie University graduate student Yana Eglit.
A genetic analysis shows they're more different from other organisms than animals and fungi (which are in different kingdoms) are from each other, representing a completely new part of the tree of life, Eglit and her colleagues report this week in the journal Nature.
They represent a major branch… that we didn't know we were missing," said Dalhousie biology professor Alastair Simpson, Eglit's supervisor and co-author of the new study.
"There's nothing we know that's closely related to them."
In fact, he estimates you'd have to go back a billion years — about 500 million years before the first animals arose — before you could find a common ancestor of hemimastigotes and any other known living things.
Like animals, plants, fungi and amoebas — but unlike bacteria — hemimastigotes have complex cells that have mini-organs called organelles including a nucleus that holds chromosomes of DNA, making them part of the "domain" of organisms called eukaryotes rather than bacteria or archaea. About 10 species of hemimastigotes have been described over more than 100 years. But up until now, no one had been able to do a genetic analysis to see how they were related to other living things.
I think it's a pretty safe bet there are a lot of critters out there we know nothing about.
They may not all be tiny. :unsure:
linkDisturbing how much like BVD's they look,
I'm not gonna ask.
Not gonna do it...:headshake
About 10 species of hemimastigotes have been described over more than 100 years.
I can't come up with an interpretation of this sentence that makes sense. These are "newly discovered" (in 1988, according to Wikipedia), so wtf happened "over more than 100 years" ???
I suppose you could say 10 species were discovered in the last millennium.
When they replace us, I hope they're better at science reporting.
My interpretation: Individual species have been discovered over the past 100 years, they were first grouped together and named as a group in '88, and the new discovery is that they are a separate kingdom (domain?).
Guess we could just write the article ourselves.
I "feel like" this is "probably" a "new(-ish)" discovery*
This is how "science" is done nowadays, amirite?
*"discovery"
Guess we could just write the article ourselves.
That's basically the Wikipedia model and it appears to usually be more accurate than anything written by reporters.
That's basically the Wikipedia model and it appears to usually be more accurate than anything written by reporters.
True. I'm a total believer in the crowd-sourced information repositories.
My interpretation was the synthesis of three sources - the article, Wikipedia, and the life/domain/kingdom/phylum chart that Bruce added.
The article is clear that the new discovery is that these are not related to previously known kingdoms. It could be clearer on whether the two particular species they found were newly discovered or just the ones that happened to be found by the researchers and used for analysis, but that's not really the point of the article.
Wikipedia mentioned when they were named as a group, and suggested that "the group should be classified at the supra-kingdom level", which is why I said "kingdom (domain?)", based on Bruce's chart (I hadn't heard of "domain" before).
That's kind of what I figured. If only there was an article written about this...
They discovered 10 types of the little buggers over 100 years but until DNA testing was available they didn't know what branch of the tree they belonged on.
Turns out they get their own Kingdom which is much more exclusive than our twig is.