Two kinds of stories I'm an irresistible sucker for: those that deal with prehistoric life and those that deal with the ocean, especially the bottommost regions. This explains why the recent discovery of animals living healthfully, consistently, and quite happily without oxygen way, way, way below the Mediterranean Sea has grabbed my attention with the kind of intense clench that it has.
This is the first time a life form like this has ever been found. Ever. It's truly remarkable. Yes, an array of single-cellular organism who've been able to subsist without oxygen have been found but never before has a multi-cellular, complex organism of the same kind been rounded up. Until now.
More fascinating, the findings were not simply evidence of former anaerobic life, but life that is brilliantly alive now, this instant, going on living without oxygen, deep below, while we prattle about above, doing this whole inhale/exhale thing (so pedestrian). Some even contain eggs. The investigators were only expecting to find viruses and bacteria; imagine their excitement at finding actual life! Less than about 1mm. in length, these things resemble the tiniest of jellyfish, which makes them extraordinarily creepy.
What's wonderful about a discovery like this is that it sheds--more like pours--light upon what life might have been like on this crazy planet of ours when oxygen levels were much, much lower, a time when--quite brazenly--animals only like this could have survived, animals to which we respectfully owe our very existence. Without life so formidable in the face of a planet so inhospitable to aerobic-based life at the time, how wonderful that these little grotesque guys worked for us? And what about the possibility, then, of other Metazoan life forms living or having lived at some point in history in other anoxic or low-oxygen settings on other planets? The questions this finding opens up are too great to detail.
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