7 Feb 2012

Fossil find sheds light on earliest animals

9:12 am on 7 February 2012

Scientists digging in a Namibia park have uncovered fossils that they believe to represent the earth's first animals - millions of years before animal life was thought to have existed.

The tiny vase-shaped creatures' fossils were found in rocks between 760 and 550 million years old.

That means animals, previously thought to have emerged 600 million to 650 million years ago, may have appeared 100 million to 150 million years before that.