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Early life

Origins of multicellularity

Interpreting truly ancient fossils is an especially tricky business. The conclusion that 2.1-billion-year-old structures from Gabon are the remains of large colonial organisms will get palaeobiologists talking.

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Figure 1: Evidence of early life, and the chemical state of the atmosphere and oceans.

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Donoghue, P., Antcliffe, J. Origins of multicellularity. Nature 466, 41–42 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/466041a

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