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The Magician’s Ball

We know that humans are supposed to have evolved from apes, and land animals from fish, but what did the very first animals look like?

In a recent paper published in the journal History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, Andrew Reynolds, an historian and philosopher of science at CBU, and his co-author, the protozoologist Dr. Norbert Hülsmann of the Free University of Berlin, tackle the common theory that plants and animals evolved from microscopic single-celled organisms known as protists. Their research explores the scientific career of one such organism first discovered in the 19th century and for a time promoted as living fossil of the earliest form of animal life.

Called Magosphaera planula, meaning the “magician’s ball”, this tiny collection of cells, found by the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel off the coast of Norway in 1869, was regarded as an important clue to the evolution of the first multicellular animals.

What was so magical about it, according to Haeckel and others, was its complicated life cycle which included diverse forms of protozoa and early stages of animal embryology. Starting as a spherical colony of cells swimming about by means of a number of tiny hairs (flagella), the ball eventually broke up into independent single-celled protozoa. Each of these flagellated cells then morphed into amoebae which in turn underwent an egg-like development, continuously dividing until the whole colony was recreated once again to swim about in the ocean.

Haeckel surmised there were similarities between this simple organism and the development of modern animal embryos. This supposition made Magosphaera a sort of ‘living fossil’ of early animal evolution.

The “magician’s ball” became an object of intense scientific interest, and Haeckel its celebrated discoverer. But just as the fickle public forgets the stars of yesteryear, Magosphaera eventually disappeared from the radar screen of biological theorizing. . And because Haeckel was reportedly the only scientist to actually observe the creature, there were not a lot of clues to follow. That is, until Andrew Reynolds and Norbert Hülsmann took up the cause. They decided they wanted to know more about this living fossil, what it was, and why biologists eventually stopped discussing it around the middle of the twentieth century.

Finding answers to these questions required a good deal of archival detective work in German university libraries in Jena and Berlin, and in the Darwin archives at the University of Cambridge, England. Their investigation also included an excursion to the small North Sea island of Helgoland, where Reynolds and Hülsmann tried to track down samples of the organism. While the trip to Helgoland failed to capture a live Magosphaera specimen, it did cement a productive research partnership between the philosopher and the zoologist, culminating in a paper entitled “Ernst Haeckel’s Discovery of Magosphaera planula: a Vestige of Metazoan Origins?”

That essay, which traces nearly one hundred years of scientific research and investigates several different forms of protozoa and sponge cells that Haeckel had (perhaps) mistakenly synthesized into a unique organismal life cycle, reveals the difficulty of observing live microscopic organisms and following their life histories. It also shows how tangled the career of a scientific object can be and how even the most magical of finds will thrive only as long as there is a theoretical environment to sustain it.

Although Haeckel was probably mistaken about the actual nature of Magosphaera, the authors note that fossilized animal embryos from the pre-Cambrian period recently discovered in China show a remarkable resemblance to Magosphaera planula. The mystery of multi-cellular animal origins lives on as 21st century scientists continue to search for a “magician’s ball” capable of revealing some important and reliable clues. 

Professor Reynolds’s research was supported by research grants from Cape Breton University and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.