 A billion year old fossil unearthed in the Scottish Highlands has been held as a crucial missing link in the evolution of life, according to new research. Wait till you hear this. The fossil was found at Loch Torridon and reveals an organism which is more complex than a single celled creature but is not truly a multicellular. It occupies an archaeological niche and it sheds light on how the most primitive lifeforms evolved into the myriad fauna we see today. And this fossil is thought to be the earliest known example of an organism which contains two distinct cell types. Single celled life, called prokaryotes, first appeared on Earth over 4 billion years ago when the planet and solar system were only in their infancy according to a conventional understanding. The fossil has been named Bicellum Brassieri and fills a gap between the emergence of a single celled life in the Cambrian explosion 600 million years ago which saw a huge diversification. When it was at this time, oxygen levels in the atmosphere soared which led to a huge proliferation in the numbers of species alive. The time between these events is known as a protozoic era and very little is known about this period. Lead author of the study, Professor Charles Wellman of the University of Sheffield said The origins of complex multicellularity and the origins of animals are considered two of the most important events in the history of life on Earth. Our discovery sheds new light on both of these. We have found a primitive spherical organism made up of an arrangement of two distinct cell types. It's the first steps towards a complex multicellular structure, something which has never been described before in the fossil record, completely unprecedented. The researcher goes on to say that the discovery of this new fossil suggests to us that the evolution of multicellular animals had occurred at least one billion years ago and that the early events prior to this evolution of animals may have occurred in fresh water like lakes rather than in the ocean. This new discovery in the Scottish Highlands marks a key moment when bacteria became capable of photosynthesis and sexual reproduction, which laid the foundations for much of life today. Bicellum was found on rocks around Loch Torridon. It's a hotspot for finding the preserved remains of a plethora of animals. And it's widely believed that extinct organisms that once lived at the bottom of lakes gave rise to green algae and land plants. Professor Paul Stroffer of Boston College in Massachusetts said, biologists have long speculated that the origins of animals included the incorporation and repurposing of prior genes that had evolved earlier in uncellular organisms. What we see in bicellum is an example of such a genetic system involving cell-cell adhesion and cell differentiation that may have incorporated into the animal genome half a billion years later. How would you guys think about that one? Some new discoveries have been made in Egypt this week, just like every other week it seems, and the scale of discoveries simply off the charts and in recent months, a series of discoveries down shafts in Saqqara has captivated the world of archaeology, and just this week ancient burial tombs thought to predate the pharaohs were discovered. Ancient archaeologists have unearthed 110 burial tombs on the Nile Delta, dating to periods before Egypt's famous dynasties and pharaonic kingdoms had emerged more than 5,000 years ago, and they also found tombs nearby from the later Hyksos period from between 1,650 BC and 1,500 BC, when western Asian migrants took over the country, putting an end to Egypt's middle kingdom. These very important findings in the Dakhlia province north of Cairo could shed some light in two important transitional periods in ancient Egypt. Included in this very important discovery are 68 oval shaped tombs from the Butto period, this spanned from 6,000 BC to 3,300 BC, and 5 other oval shaped tombs from Nakhada the 3rd period, which was just before the emergence of Egypt's first dynasties around 3,100 BC, according to a statement on Facebook from the Ministry of Antiquities in Egypt. This also included 37 rectangular shaped tombs from the 2nd intermediate period, and this is the time when the Semitic people of Hyksos first began migrating across the Sinai into Egypt around 1,800 years BC. Salima Ikran, an Egyptologist at American University in Cairo said about the discovery, he says, This is an extremely interesting cemetery because it combines some of the earliest periods of Egyptian history with an other important era, the time of the Hyksos. Egyptologists are currently working very hard to understand how the Egyptians and the Hyksos live together and to what degree the former took on Egyptian traditions. The Butto tombs were oval shaped pits with the corpses placed inside in a squatting position mostly on their left sides with the head point in west, the Ministry said. Some of the tombs from the Narkada period contained cylindrical and pear shaped vessels, the Hyksos tombs were mainly semi-rectangular with the corpses lying in an extended position and the head also facing west. The mission also found a group of ovens, stoves, remnants of mud bricks foundations, pottery, vessels and amulets, especially scarabs, some of which were made of semi-precious stones and jewellery such as earrings, and the scarabs are a great clue because they suggest that these people emerged from the cave system after the cataclysm but before the rise of the empire, these people could be the very civilisation that inspired religion, such was their influence of the squatterfield. These people brought forth stories such as the Assyrus myth into culture that assimilates into Egyptian culture which assimilates into Christianity, the myth becomes unbelievable to us in the modern times but the events don't lie. This all happened from the cave to the empire, to the assimilation of thought and the forgetting of the root point of it all, that being that they saw all of it in the sky over a very long period of time. This discovery is the latest in a series of archaeological discoveries in recent years for which Egypt has sought publicity in the hopes of reviving its tourism sector as the centenary of the King Tut find approaches in 2022. Tourism has been badly hurt by the turmoil following a 2011 uprising and now global travel restrictions but what do you guys think about this anyway? Comments below and as always, thank you for watching.