yeah, ok, giant for a virus. The question remains does this count as a virus... or a new type of life; and is it life at all if we don't count viruses as being alive.

Of course most scientists don't give a proverbial shit about whether it 'counts' or not, because it is still an awesome thing that does stuff, and it is questions about what this stuff looks like which are interesting.

I don't think I understand too much of the article though, or the article doesn't understand too much about what it is.

Do they know how those pandoraviruses come to be? Do they know if they are a step in evolution, like between viruses and animals? Do they know anything about them chemically?

And I didn't quite get what happens between this thing and an amoebe (if that's how you write it? On mobile now)?

Also do they have offspring in any way? Do they duplicate?

The article states they infect bacterial cells and then duplicate before bursting out of the bacterial cell so yes, they duplicate.

Ok, thanks for the answer, but now I wonder something else: when they duplicate, are they immediately huge or do they grow huge?

I should probably clarify that: if I'm right, with duplication, the original virus normally splits in two equal viruses, is that the same with this one?

Steephie, i think the answer to most of those questions is, we're not sure (though they do replicate). This is new.

But from what i can gather they replicate by infecting amoeba.

They can be seen under a microscope and have thus probably been mistaken for bacteria and ignored for years. There is some suggestion that they could have the same origin as the nucleus of a cell (the bit that contains all the nuclear DNA, and is thought of as the control centre of the cell) - notice not all cells have a nucleus, eukaryote cells do (this includes all animals, plants, fungi and amoebae) prokaryote cells do not (Archaea and Bacteria)

But this could all be guess work at the moment, what we know about the evolution of Archaea, Bacteria and Eukaryotes is limited to about 3.6 billion years ago, and it seems likely (to me) that before this we have viruses, prions and other types of proto-life which we currently don't know about (either because it doesn't exist anymore, or we haven't found it yet)

Ok, then I probably didn't understand much of the article because the writer of the article doesn't understand much of how it works either. I thought it may have just been that I didn't understand some of the English used in it.

Thanks for clearing it up anyway.