Can you find out what the oldest evidence of multi-celled life is?

Question

Can you find out what the oldest evidence of multi-celled life is?

Answer 1

There are to find varying viewpoints about the oldest evidence of multicelled life.

Here some examples:

"The oldest multicellular algae fossil dates to 1,200 mya."

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/change...

"The organisms, resembling small jellyfish, evolved long before the appearance of bones. They lived an estimated 590 million years ago,about 15 million years earlier than other known fossils of multicellular life, Dr. McMenamin said."

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.ht...

"The Ediacaran Period covers some 50 million years of ancient time on our planet from 600 million years ago to about 542 million years ago.

It officially becomes part of the Neoproterozoic, when multi-celled life forms started to take hold on Earth."

http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/blob...

And wikipedia reports in "Life before the Cambrian":

"Excepting a few contested reports of much older forms from Texas and India, the first complex multicelled life forms seem to have appeared roughly 600 Ma. A quite diverse collection of soft-bodied forms is known from a variety of locations worldwide between 542 and 600 Ma. These are referred to as Ediacaran or Vendian biota. Hard-shelled creatures appeared toward the end of that timespan."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precambrian

These last publications seem to be on solid ground.