Tardigrades turn into glass when they dry out

Re:Tardigrades turn into glass when they dry out by dclowd9901 on Saturday December 26, 2015 @02:53AM (#10793619)

I was going to say the same thing. Such a hardy species I would think would be the product of an incredible amount of evolutionary progress. How do they fit in with the rest of the living species taxonomy?

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Re:Tardigrades turn into glass when they dry out by lifeisstillgood on Saturday December 26, 2015 @04:16AM (#10793725)

Don't get too excited - the Wikipedia article (very good) explores their genome and taxonomy. Fossilised records hard to come by but cambrian and Cretaceous records have been found. So probably boringly terrestrial

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Re:Tardigrades turn into glass when they dry out by babuskov on Saturday December 26, 2015 @04:24AM (#10793737)

Or it could simply mean that they came to Earth a long time ago.

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Re:Tardigrades turn into glass when they dry out by iSnow on Saturday December 26, 2015 @05:37AM (#10793833)

Sure, but as of now, there is no positive indication they are extraterrestrial. They fit into the species cladogram, they don't seem to suddenly appear as a time anomaly, they just seem like extremely tough little guys.

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Re:Tardigrades turn into glass when they dry out by embwbam on Saturday December 26, 2015 @11:26AM (#10794439)

I read somewhere that they can absorb DNA from foreign sources (other animals, etc) into their cells when they rehydrate, leading to an accelerated rate of evolution.

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Re:Tardigrades turn into glass when they dry out by pajaroide on Saturday December 26, 2015 @02:20PM (#10794918)

Here's an article about that: http://phys.org/news/2015-11-huge-chunk-tardigrade-genome-fo...

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