All modern animals are multicellular creatures that begin life as a hollow ball of cells and eat other things for sustenance, so it’s reasonable to think that our common ancestor shared the same traits.12 These rosettes, then, are modern representations of what the first animals may have looked like. And the process that creates them, where a single cell divides into a cohesive colony, recapitulates the kind of evolutionary transition that gave rise to those proto-animals, and eventually to squirrels, pigeons, ducks, children and every other beast in the park where King and I are talking.
