World’s Oldest Anus – The Weird Side of the Internet

World’s Oldest Anus – The Weird Side of the Internet – by Liam Sweeny.

Comb jellies. Basically jellyfish that have some numbers in and about the Florida region. They are fascinating creatures, mainly because they’re some of the oldest living species out there – 700 million years old, may 800 million. But one of the things that make them of special interest to scientists, is that they are known to have a ‘gut through,’ as in a tube that goes through them, an in-door for food and an out-door for waste. What is this in layman’s speak? Simple. They have the world’s oldest a**hole.

Before comb jellies, most creature let out through the in-door. Their mouths were their poopers; their poopers were their mouths. This was fiercely inefficient and wildly unhygienic. It was a stunt to evolution. But the comb jellies had what it took to make a duke they didn’t need to brush their teeth after.

It is difficult to say whether we inherited our back-end architecture from comb jellies or whether we independently evolved ours. It does seem like have a conveyor belt system would be in the best interest of evolution, and would be an inevitable development, but here’s a fun fact: the human embryo develops from the a**hole out, so we are all born an a**hole. Another fact is that the comb jellies bioluminesce, or glow, when their water is disturbed, and the reason I bring that up is because, coincidently, humans bioluminesce too. We just can’t see ourselves glow because it’s too week for our eyes to see.

So can you imagine being somewhere in Florida, hanging out with the world’s oldest a**holes, glowing and you have to sit in the boat and ponder what sort of life would find you in such a predicament.  And to wonder about the fact that it was by the invention of the bunghole that we were able to climb from the primordial soup and begin the long and arduous journey to getting on a social media comments section and coming full circle. Imagine.

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