Moon Ascidian

Guardian: Katie Feagan

Lissoclinum patella

If you were looking through a really big family photo album that had your parents, grandparents, great grandparents and so on and so on, eventually you would see a creature that looks like this (only in black and white). Long before mobile phones and motorcars before any land creature in fact, life was nothing but bacteria floating through the oceans. Some began eating others, and building bodies and they became filter feeders. In time these filter feeders needed a way to move away from the crowds and this particular one, the ascidian, had a little tadpole with a stiff inner rod in its centre so that it could swim.

This is where backbones came from, or fish, then fish with legs, then reptiles, reptiles with heating systems, mammals, mammals with memory and then memory stored in USB devices that can be plugged into avatars.