Without predators in their steamy, unfinished environment, Earth's first organisms were free to spend their days screwing and reproducing in every way imaginable -- sort of like college kids in summer school.
The tube-like creatures called Funisia dorothea anchored themselves in abundant flocks onto the shallow, sandy seabed of what is now the Australian outback.
Nothing appears to have evolved yet to eat them, so they lived peaceful lives, reproducing sexually at times and by asexual methods such as budding at other times, Mary Droser of the University of California Riverside and colleagues reported in the journal Science.
[img by David Hardy]