Under the sea - a creature from another time

OK, so it's not really a "living fossil." But that other overused term, "missing link," has some utility here. 

 Two billion years ago, microbes with a nucleus and other changes from the bacteria and the archaea evolved, and, as this article explains, they kept evolving into every multicellular creature on planet Earth, including us. A new sample from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean yielded a strain of archaea, dubbed Lokiarchaeum, which had many eukaryote-type features including genes that code for the proteins giving eukaryotes a complex structure the other types lack. . Since the latter evolved from the former, this was a snapshot of early evolution that had scientists jumping up and down (I don't know if the "jumping" part is literally true, but it seems close enough).
To swipe the key language from this article, "Lokiarchaeum was much more complex than other archaea and bacteria, although not as complex as true eukaryotes... a Lokiarchaeum-like ancestor could have evolved into the first full-blown eukaryotes.. Once the ancestors of eukaryotes evolved a complex skeleton, the next major step may have been the origin of mitochondria."

The scientific team is trying to learn more about these creatures, despite the handicaps of limited supply and the annoying fact the microbes keep dying soon after being scooped up.  But the work done so far has given us a look at evolution from the days when dinosaurs were only one of Nature's dreams and humans were not even that.  Keep up the good science, guys!