Hydrogen bombshell: Rewriting life's history

We all need oxygen to live right? No organism can survive without oxygen right? 'Oxygen is supposed to have driven the evolution of complex life' right? Wrong, wrong, wrong! A new discovery will make us rewrite our theory of evolution.

"Some fish, mussels and sediment-dwelling worms can live without oxygen for hours or even days. Instead of getting energy by "burning" food, the cells of these animals switch to ways of producing energy that do not require oxygen. Until earlier this year, no animals had been discovered that go their entire lives without oxygen (see main story) - it was thought to be impossible.

Oxygen is not only used for getting energy from food, it is also needed to make compounds like collagen, the "glue" that holds animals together. No oxygen, no collagen; no collagen, no animals, the thinking went. That must be wrong, although we have yet to work out how"

Instead of using the mitochondria to produce oxygen, the organisms use Hydrogenosome.

 "The ability of ancestral mitochondria to make hydrogen, rather than use oxygen, was the basis of the primordial pact that gave rise to the eukaryotes, Martin and Müller argued. The bacteria produced hydrogen as waste, and the host cell used it to convert carbon dioxide into methane, gleaning a little energy from the process - just as many archaea, called methanogens, still do. The symbiosis began in an environment with little or no oxygen and only later, after the relationship was well established, did the host cell start exploiting the ability of the ancestral mitochondria to use oxygen.

This idea, known as the "hydrogen hypothesis", was proposed by Martin and Müller in 1998 (Nature, vol 392, p 37), but it has never gained widespread acceptance. It was not just up against the gut feeling of most researchers that the rise of the eukaryotes was related in"

The creatures go by the name of  Loricifera, and some are located under the Mediterranean sea.

Here is a picture of what they look like.

Looks a lot  like a jelly fish

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This just blows my mind. There could be life all over the place! However before this discovery everyone would have said that it wasn't possible. This just shows how close minded our scientists are. If you went to a scientist twenty years ago and told them that life can exist in extreme locations such as volcanoes and in extreme cold, they would all just laugh at you. You don't make new discoveries by being close minded! You need to have an open mind to explore new ideas.