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Scientists say the Monterey Bay holds answers to the major secrets of life.
Good morning.
You never know what you’re going to learn from the newspaper. Sure, you can expect some broad categories—updates on various city council issues, interviews with interesting, artistic locals. But what about an answer to the elusive question of who, or what, is a human’s oldest ancestor?
Tajha Chappellet-Lanier here, pleased and surprised to report that this is among the many things you can learn is this week’s edition of the Weekly. In a news story, my colleague David Schmalz reports that a team of researchers, some of whom are local, have found what they believe to be a definitive answer to the question: From what did human life evolve from some 700 million years ago? Sponges, or comb jellies?
I’m going to let you read the story to find out the answer. But I will leave you with the words of Darrin Schultz, previously a graduate student researcher at MBARI and UC Santa Cruz and now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna, who was part of the team that did this work and really knows how to localize such a global, evolutionary finding: “All the animals we used were collected in Monterey Bay,” he says. “You can go anywhere out on the beach, and all of these things are in [your] backyard. All of the unanswered secrets to life are all out there in Monterey Bay.”
-Tajha Chappellet-Lanier, associate editor, tajha@mcweekly.com
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