Three circular fossils found in China are supposed to be from the world’s initial animals, dating back 600 million years.

A latest research, which is available in the journal Nature, titled Cell differentiation and germ–soma separation in Ediacaran animal embryo-like fossils, discloses that the fossils, identified as Megasphaera, are multicellular organisms from 60 million years before skeletal animals become visible on earth in what is recognized as the Cambrian Explosion.

For researchers, this has challenged numerous ancient theories about the development of multicellular organisms.

“This opens an innovative path for us to discover more secrets about the ancient multicellular fossils and the evolutionary steps that were taken by multicellular organisms that would ultimately go on to control the Earth in a very noticeable way,” said Shuhai Xiao, a professor of Geobiology in the Virginia Tech College of Science.

The research has revealed that the Megasphaera showed indications of cell-to-cell adhesion, differentiation, and planned cell death, which are aspects of difficult multicellular eukaryotes, such as animals and plants.

They are doubtful to be bacteria or single-celled life, as earlier thought, because their difficult multicellular nature doesn’t match that of those forms of life from 600 million years ago.

Fossils comparable to these have been understood as bacteria, single-cell eukaryotes, algae, and transitional forms associated with current animals such as sponges, sea anemones, or bilaterally balanced animals and this paper lets us put aside some of those clarifications.

The three strange fossils were recovered from phosphate rocks in an effort to find out more about how multicellularity arose from single-celled ancestors and the discovery have shed a new light on the development and the details about how and when single-celledorganisms connected with others to make one life form.

Investigate report will now concentrate on wider paleontological search in order to recreating the whole life-cycle of the fossils and this, successively, should inform researchers a bit more about the origins of life on Earth.