Back to Asgard

 

Credit: pitpony.photography

I blogged about this before (see second link). This seems to be the sequel! So there is a hypothesis that the evolutionary ancestors of the eukaryotes (a vast group of organisms including animals, plants and fungi) were Archaea. Asgard Archaea, more exactly. Or perhaps some unknown microbe living in symbiosis with a bacterium *inside* an Archaeon? The content linked below isn´t entirely clear on this topic, but some kind of hybridization is the bottom line. 

The problem, apparently, is that the bacterium participating in the primordial merger needed oxygen to survive. Asgard Archaea, on the other hand, can´t stand oxygen. However, recent research suggests that some of them actually can do so, making the scenario more plausible. 

Personally, I like the fact that our deep evolutionary ancestors might (at least partially) be tentacled micro-organisms named after the abode of the Norse gods, and that some of them have been found in a remote part of the Atlantic Ocean named after Loki. Life looks like a "trickster", somehow...   

Ancient "Asgard" microbe might have used oxygen

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