The secret of living fossils is in mutation-proof DNA - Biotech. The discovery, which could open a new way to fight tumors, is published in the journal Evolution.
Charles Darwin coined the expression 'living fossil' in 1859 to indicate organisms that still seem perfectly identical to their ancestors who lived millions of years ago and whose testimony is told by fossils. If this hypothesis were confirmed it could also have important implications for medicine because "most tumors are somatic mutations that represent failures of an individual's DNA repair mechanisms"