Otavia didn't evolve much, but perhaps it didn't need to. The record shows that if the researchers are right, Otavia weathered at least two "snowball Earths," periods when the global temperatures plunged and almost the entire planet was ice-bound. And the organism lasted for 200 million years by the best estimates, suggesting this potential ancestor to all things animal was a lot hardier than a lot of the larger multicellular species that have come into being since.