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Half a billion years ago, there existed a worm-like creature the size of a grain of rice.

And a new study finds that this animal may have been the first to crawl around the

sea floor, gobble up organic matter at one one end and poop it out the other end.

The creature dubbed Ikaria Waruudia was probably one of our oldest relatives.

Ikaria is maybe the oldest bilaterally animal that we find in the fossil record.

So this is twice as old or more than things like dinosaurs.

University of California Riverside paleontologist Scott Evans.

He says animals like sponges are even more ancient,

but they lack the bilateral symmetry that characterizes most animals today.

So a front and a back and a symmetrical left and right side.

And bilaterally also have an opening for food to go in, an opening for ways to go out, and a gut connecting them,

basically a tube. And really most animals, you know, everything from insects to mammals to us,

those are all bilaterally that are around today.

Evans and his colleagues discovered the humble creatures in fossil layers from the

idiacra hills of South Australia. They use 3D laser scanners from NASA to make high-resolution

images of Ikaria and the surfaces they lived on. The scans confirm the animal's bilateral body morphology and reveal the shape of the

burrows they left from scavenging the sea floor.

It probably had a body that was divided into what we refer to as modules or units or

segments and because of the way it moved through the sediment we think it had

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