A statement of overwhelming merit--if you happen to have the DNA of that silurian to compare with its modern cousins' DNA.
Creatures maintain physical form through substantial DNA drift--most multi-cellulars change much more in response to viruses than to environmental changes that would reflect in changes in physical morphology.
which suggest that the group and related families originated relatively recently, says evolutionary biologist Todd Oakley of the University of California, Santa Barbara."
So does finding silurian creatures above dinosaurs, or finding a dinosaur bone in the silurian, until we remember that a billion or so years is a long time for good data to lie about undisturbed by time and chance and to hold our water until we have a statistically significant weight of finds, and an understanding of what continental folding and erosion has done to the strata in question.
There is nothing new about this--it happens all the time, it just doesn't usually go so high up the Tree of Life as to make the news. And this news is premature--I see no signs of plans afoot to make any such revision on the basis of this evidence, as yet.
We know [sic] that mitochondria arose [sic] as intracellular symbionts [sic] in the evolutionary past. But in what sort of host? That question still has biologists dumbfounded. In the most popular theories, Giardia is seen as a direct descendant of a hypothetical eukaryotic host lineage that existed [sic] before mitochondria did. But Tovar and colleagues findings show that Giardia cannot have descended directly from such a host, because Giardia has mitosomes. So our understanding [sic] of the original [sic] mitochondrial host is not improved by these new findings, but our understanding of mitochondria certainly is. In its role as a living fossil from the time of prokaryote-to-eukaryote transition, Giardia is now retired. But it assumes a new place in the textbooks as an exemplary eukaryote with tiny mitochondria that have a tenacious grip on an essential and anaerobic biochemical pathway. (Emphasis added in all quotes.)
Also of interest in this report is Henze and Martins admission that the whole story of eukaryote evolution is slightly less than watertight: The prokaryotes came first [sic]; eukaryotes (all plants, animals, fungi and protists) evolved from them [sic], and to this day biologists hotly debate how this transition took place, with about 20 different theories on the go. Hate to break it to them on an already bad day, but the endosymbiont theory is not as watertight as they assume, either (see a rebuttal by Don Batten.)
Even assuming their assumption, Tovar et al. admit that whatever this endosymbiont was, it was not a simple clod: Thus, the original endosymbiont must have possessed the capacity to synthesize FeS clusters and to assemble them into functional redox and electron transport proteins. If you dont know how to do that, dont expect that a germ figured it out millions of years ago.