Humans will never last as long as this critter.
No one knows what the first animal was but scientists have been able to travel back in time to a time when the Earth was a snowball of ice.
Fossil records reveal the oldest known species as that of a small, tube-like, multi-cellular, primitive sponge known as Otavia antiqua. The oldest known specimen lived 760 million years ago in Namibia, filtering mud and feeding on algae and bacteria. With a size somewhere comparable to a grain of sand, it isn’t much to look at.
Still, it was one tough species. It survived at least two epic global freezes, and hung around an estimated 200 million years before disappearing during the Cambrian Explosion.
Short answer: It’s likely the first animal was a sponge of some sort several hundred million years ago. And, yes, you ultimately evolved from it.
