More than half a billion years ago, the deep, dark ocean was aglow with the eerie light of bioluminescent corals, new genetic and fossil analyses suggest. The findings push the origins of bioluminescence back by nearly 300 million years, researchers report April 24 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
“Our study presents the oldest published record for the appearance of bioluminescence on Earth, and more than doubles the previous record for when bioluminescence first appeared,” says Danielle DeLeo, an integrative biologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. The previous record, reported in 2022, was set by the 267-million-year-old ancestor of sea fireflies — small,
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