 | Scientists used a shave-and-photograph technique to develop these three-dimensional images of the creature. |
Scientists have discovered a very well preserved, ocean-dwelling creature from 425-million-year-old rocks in the United Kingdom that may be the world's oldest fossil animal that is definitively male, according to a study published this week in Science.
The fossil record is packed with shells from this group of arthropods. The "ostracodes," fossilized soft parts such as those discovered by a group of researchers that included Yale scientist Derek Briggs, are extremely rare.
"The ostracodes are important for two reasons," says Briggs, professor of geology and geophysics and one of the principal investigators of the study. "They give us insights about crustacean evolution, and they're widely used to work out the age of rock sequences."
The finding pushes back the earliest described evidence for soft-tissue anatomy of this important group of living crustaceans by nearly 200 million years, say the researchers. Ostracode appendages, soft parts that protrude from the gap between its two hinged shells, suggest that the creature swam and scavenged for food along the ocean floor.
The authors cracked open the rock with the embedded creature and embarked on a shave-and-photograph technique that yielded a virtual fossil with extraordinarily preserved three-dimensional details. The five-millimeter long fossil is remarkably similar to some modern ostracodes, say the scientists, who note that this likeness suggests an extremely low rate of evolutionary change over the last 425 million years.
The researchers have called the new species "Colymbosathon ecplecticos."
"It's a nice example of very slow evolutionary change, reflected in a very conservative morphology over a long period of time," Briggs says.
Co-authors included David Siveter of Leicester and Mark Sutton and Derek Siveter, both of Oxford University.
-- By Jacqueline Weaver
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