Microbes that eat collagen may explain missing soft-bodied fossils
University of Cambridge researchers report that collagen-eating enzymes, called collagenases, spread to oxygen-using bacteria about 539 million years ago. They say this may help explain why soft-bodied animal fossils become rare after the Ediacaran.
The team traced collagenase genes across 700 bacterial genomes. They argue the enzymes evolved in microbes and spread around the Ediacaran-Cambrian transition, which made soft-bodied animals harder to fossilise. The work is peer-reviewed and appears in the journal Current Biology. The link to the fossil record is an inference from genome and timing analysis, not direct fossil evidence, and the authors present it as a possible mechanism.