By Losing Genes, Life Often Evolved More Complexity

Seldom Bucket

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When Cristian Cañestro set out in the early 2000s to study how animals with brains and backbones evolved, he picked a sea squirt called Oikopleura as a useful subject. Like all sea squirts, it has a tiny brain and nerve cord, but unlike the others, Oikopleura doesn’t undergo a metamorphosis on its way to maturity. Cañestro thought that Oikopleura had perhaps retained simpler, more ancestral features than other sea squirts and could be a guide to what they had evolved from.

 
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