An early evolutionary stage in animal embryonic development, theorized to represent an ancestor form of multicellular life.
From Greek 'blastos' (bud, sprout) plus -aea suffix used in scientific taxonomy. The term comes from evolutionary biology's attempt to name ancestral forms.
Scientists theorized the 'blastaea' as a proto-ancestor—it would have been a hollow ball of cells, a hypothesis that helps us understand how single-celled life first became multicellular!
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