{"id":84837,"date":"2018-11-17T14:22:25","date_gmt":"2018-11-17T22:22:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/11\/bizarre-microbes-represent-a-major-new-branch-on-the-evolutionary-family-tree"},"modified":"2018-11-17T14:22:25","modified_gmt":"2018-11-17T22:22:25","slug":"bizarre-microbes-represent-a-major-new-branch-on-the-evolutionary-family-tree","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/11\/bizarre-microbes-represent-a-major-new-branch-on-the-evolutionary-family-tree","title":{"rendered":"Bizarre Microbes Represent a Major New Branch on the Evolutionary Family Tree"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/bizarre-microbes-represent-a-major-new-branch-on-the-evolutionary-family-tree.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Canadian scientists have identified microscopic creatures that are so unlike anything seen before, they had to create an entirely new branch on the evolutionary tree of life to slot them in.<\/p>\n<p>A new <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-018-0708-8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">paper<\/a> published this week in Nature offers the first genetic analysis of hemimastigotes\u2014a rare and poorly understood group of single-celled microorganisms. Biologists have known about these wee beasties for well over a century, but only now can hemimastigotes be officially slotted into the evolutionary tree of life, a process more formally known as <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Phylogenetic_tree\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">phylogeny<\/a>. And by doing so, scientists have stumbled upon a completely new branch on the tree of life\u2014one dating back billions of years.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"https:\/\/gizmodo.com\/bizarre-microbes-represent-a-major-new-branch-on-the-ev-1830496441\">https:\/\/gizmodo.com\/bizarre-microbes-represent-a-major-new-b...1830496441<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Canadian scientists have identified microscopic creatures that are so unlike anything seen before, they had to create an entirely new branch on the evolutionary tree of life to slot them in. A new paper published this week in Nature offers the first genetic analysis of hemimastigotes\u2014a rare and poorly understood group of single-celled microorganisms. Biologists [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,412],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biological","category-genetics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84837"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84837\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}