Ann Jones

On RN, you're listening to What the Duck, where we have just begun an adventure into deep time and deep into the underpants of the world, we're trying to trace the evolution of sex.

So these eukaryotes, everything that comes after them in the tree of life can sexually reproduce.

That is the start of us all, in a way.

It's the start of vixens, blowflies, boobies, and pobble bonks.

Just bonking away.

Not that the very first sexy beasts were anything like that.

Absolutely tiny and still relatively simple.

Emily Mitchell, deep-time ecologist.

These are the rengiomorphs.

Unlike any animal we know today, looking something like a cross between a seaweed and a sea cucumber.

And they are the first known organism to have an orgy.

They were stuck to the ocean's floor, waving about in the tides like horny teens in the standing room only section of a Justin Bieber concert.

Yeah.

Ah-hoo, Georgie.

This is a type of external fertilisation.

You throw your gametes, your eggs and sperm, out into the ocean of life and hope that they meet up with other nice gametes from next door.

Wow.

The best of both worlds.

What a way to bring sexual reproduction into the animal kingdom, eh?

having it both ways.