Why do scientists think that all modern

plants, animals and fungi can be traced to

protists ancestors?
When biologists say two groups of organisms are more closely related to each
other than they are to a third group, they mean the two groups share a more
recent common ancestor. Fungi (protists) and animals share a more recent
common ancestor with each other than they do with plants, which means that
we are more closely related to mushrooms than we are to trees. Fungi,
animals and protistan relatives of the animal kingdom form a group or clade
that share common ancestry.

The first multicellular animals presumably evolved from colonial protists (most likely
choanoflagellates), and within the colonies, cells progressively differentiated from one another,
acquiring specific functional characteristics. It may sound like a bit of a stretch, but in fact such a
phenomenon can be observed in colonies of extant unicellular organisms, both prokaryotes and
eukaryotes, where some cells of the colony can become differentiated under particular
environmental conditions.

We can speculate that early in the history of animals some differentiation genetic programs
evolved, got stabilized, and became inheritable from one generation to the next. Once different
populations of cells were established in the colony, the door was opened to further specialization.
Specialized cells were not initially grouped in organs but were more like regionalized
populations or layers of cells, as we see in sponges, and morphogenesis progressively evolved
and some level of organization appeared. This scenario presumably reflects what happened at the
genetic level, where the evolution differentiation genetic programs preceded the formation of
body plan patterning genetic programs. In bilaterians, the evolution of a third germ layer, the
mesoderm, certainly boosted the anatomical diversity and complexity of organs, even though the
core cellular mechanisms remained unchanged.

Future genomic and functional comparisons between choanoflagellates, sponges, and cnidarians
will certainly shed new light on the relationship of organs in animals and their early evolution.

(http://www.hhmi.org/askascientist/answers/how_did_organs_evolve_in_simple_multicellular_organis
ms_for_example_how_did_the_liver_or_its_pred.html)

Animals, as part of our own planet, were a marvelous evolutionary development in the face of
yet another problem. Some protists, after running out of food, were unable to make their own
food from light because they contained no bluegreen bacteria, or their chloroplast descendants.
We are not sure whether our own protist forebears never took in any bluegreens or whether they
took some in and later lost them. We do know that plants have always had both chloroplasts and
mitochondria, which allow them to make food using sunlight and to burn food using oxygen.
Animals, including ourselves, can only burn ready-made food.

This means that plants could -- and still do -- live their whole lives sitting in one place, making
their own food, while animals had to evolve ways of going after their food. Animals, as we will
see, evolved all sorts of equipment, from eyes and ears to feet and wings, to heating and cooling
systems, to nervous systems with brains for organizing all this complexity, just to help them
chase after food -- and all because they had no chloroplasts!

Nature is, of course, never quite as orderly as we would have her, so she managed to leave
around some puzzles such as the giant green clam, an animal that does have chloroplasts and
uses them to make emergency energy from sunlight, though it is clearly an animal in every other
way.

Among the earliest multicelled animals to evolve from protist colonies were polyps. Luckily,
there are still many living polyp species that match ancient fossils and so give us clues to their
early evolution. Actually, polyps look more like plants than the animals they are. Sea anemones,
which look like flowers, are polyps; forests of coral are huge polyp colonies.

The polyp animal is shaped like a tube with a flowerlike circle of tentacles at one end around its
mouth. The other end of the tube is stuck to a rock or to the body of another polyp in its colony.
And there it stays. It is a simple animal with a body organized to catch its prey in its tentacles
and stuff the food into its mouth.

Still, many polyps have rather amazingly complicated cells along their tentacles. These cells
have a special name; we call them nematocysts -- meaning `thread bags' -- because they evolved
from ingrown cilia that grew into extremely long, thin, hollow threads and became very
specialized in their job. When prey touches one of these surface cells, the long coiled thread
shoots out under the pressure of liquid filling it, tangling the victim and paralyzing it with poison
barbs. Nematocysts are a wonderful example of the amazing patterns of organization that nature
has worked out even within the cells of the smallest and simplest of creatures. Nematocysts are
such good self-contained weapons that other creatures, after eating polyps, may not digest the
nematocysts but may instead keep them for their own use in catching prey.

Polyps reproduce by budding like bacterial forbears. This job is sometimes assigned to certain
members of a polyp colony, which are fed by the others so they can concentrate on their
important work. In some species the polyp buds grow up stuck to the parent, but in others
something much more interesting happens. The newly budded polyp breaks off, flips over so its
tentacles hang down, and floats off into the sea. As it grows, it becomes a glassy bell or umbrella
with a softly fringed edge of trailing streamers -- a jellyfish, as we call it, though it is not a fish at
all. Its proper name is medusa -- a name taken from the ancient myth of a woman who had
snakes on her head instead of hair.

Medusae are a much more adventurous stage of polyp life that learned to reproduce sexually.
Some species tried having both sexes in the same individual -- as flowers and earthworms have
them -- while other species began making separate males and females. In any case, all medusae
produce female eggs and male sperm, which fuse to make baby medusae. The baby medusa is so
different from its parents that it, too, gets its own name. We call it a planula. The planula is a
long, flattish blob that rows itself about freely for a while using a fringe of cilia. Then it settles
onto a rock and sticks itself tight to grow into a polyp.

The life of a polyp is thus a matter of metamorphosis -- changing form from planula to polyp to
medusa. Such metamorphosis was later repeated in evolution, in butterflies and moths, for
example, like so many other earlier step patterns that are woven again and again into the later
dance. Polyps in countless variety still abound in the seas, looking much as did their ancient
forebears. Yet sometime, somewhere in the dim past, some of them became discontented with
this three-stage metamorphosis, which always came back to a sedentary phase, and went on to
invent more adventurous lives.

http://www.ratical.org/LifeWeb/Erthdnce/chapter8.html