“What’s exciting is the new things we’re learning about animal evolution,” said Putnam, who got involved with the project while working at the Department of Energy’sJoint Genome Institute in 2006. “For example, sponges have embryos, and having the genome helps us look at how they develop and make specific connections to developmental pathways in other animals.
“It’s the kind of thing that will lead to a much clearer understanding of what the very first metazoans looked like,” he said.
Read more at TerraDaily.