By Susan Milius
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Little asymmetric whatsits from Australia may be the oldest fossils of full-fledged animal bodies yet discovered, beating the previous contenders by tens of millions of years and pushing the evidence for animal life into an earlier geologic time.
The newly unveiled fossils, which resemble sponges, come from rocks between 635 million and 659 million years old, Adam Maloof of Princeton University and his colleagues report online in Nature Geoscience August 17. That timing sandwiches the fossils between two cold spells that iced over most of the planet during a Hollywood-disaster-style geologic period called the Cryogenian.