Although it’s the Nature piece on use of cognitive enhancers by academics that is getting all the press, there’s another cool story from Nature this week that deserves more attention than it’s getting. By crunching a huge amount of genetic data, a research team has redrawn the tree of life.

By looking at sequence tags from 29 animals they worked out their evolutionary history. Surprisingly, the oldest animal isn’t the simple sponge; it’s something rather more complex: the comb jelly (this is covered only by LiveScience as far as I can tell).

“This was a complete shocker,” says study leader Casey Dunn, of Brown University (press release). “So shocking that we initially thought something had gone very wrong.”

There are two ways, Dunn says, that the comb jelly could have beaten the sponge to primacy. It could have evolved its complex nature independent of other animals or the sponge could have evolved from more complex animals (diagram). Other people crunching through genetics though think the evidence stacks up for sponges (see this recent article from National Geographic).

Other stuff from Nature: tell us what you want to read.

Image top: comb jelly / Casey Dunn

Image lower: Zina Deretsky, NSF