Among thousands of impressions on the surface of a large rock, one stood out from the crowd. A rigid tubular exoskeleton topped with waving tentacles, now frozen in time, looked eerily familiar, unlike any of its neighbors.
It looked exactly like a relative of corals, anemones and jellyfish from a sedimentary layer 20 million years ago that was thought to have contained such Cnidaria.
“It’s not normal for whatever else we’ve tracked down in the fossil record right now,” says scientist Frankie Dunn, from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
“Most other fossils from this period have missing body plans and it is not clear how they are related to living animals. This one clearly has a skeleton, with dense tentacles that move around in water. catch food, like corals and sea anemones do today.”
The discovery itself was made in 2007 when researchers from the British Geological Society removed debris from a slab of rock on the Bradgate Formation in Charnwood Forest, a well-known fossil site just outside Leicester.
The rock itself is already considered to be really ancient, dating back around 557 to 562 million years. It was a time of truly strange creatures, long before the rich biodiversity of the Cambrian explosion brought together the body plans we are most familiar with now.
The specialists took a cast of the finished stone for study. Among the thousands of impressions depicting ancient life forms, none seemed less alien than the rest. In fact, it looked a little too much like the life we would see today.
Resembling something we might see trawling a passing crustacean on a modern coral reef, the 20-centimeter-long cnidarian now represents an early example of a predator.
“The ‘Cambrian explosion’ was remarkable. It is known as the time when the anatomy of living animal groups was fixed for the next half billion years,” Dunn explained.
“Our disclosure shows that the body plan of cnidarians [corals; jellyfish; ocean anemones, not set in stone no less than a long time back, so this is exceptionally thrilling and brings up many issues. Is.”
The Ediacaran Period is notable for its sparse but strange, very alien fossils that bear no resemblance to anything living at that time. The new findings support the theory that this is also the beginning of modern animals. The seeds of at least one group of animals that we know today were first sown during this time, just in time to really flourish and diversify during the Cambrian period.
So Dunn and his colleagues named the fossilized animal’s genus Auroralumina, meaning dawn lantern, for its resemblance to a burning torch. To the delight of Sir David Attenborough, who hunted for fossils nearby as a boy, he named it the species attenboroughii.
These strange but familiar creatures share features with early Cambrian cnidarians. However, unlike them, its hard exoskeleton is smooth rather than ornamented.
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“It’s the oldest creature we know that has a skeleton,” Dunn says. “So far we’ve only found one, but it’s hugely exciting to know when complex life began on Earth.” There will be others out there with the key to it.”
The team suspects that the larger size of Auralumina attenbrogi compared to other known relatives may mean that it does not have a free-swimming medusa stage of its life cycle like jellyfish and corals. Anemones also lack this phase – they are sessile animals that are always stuck in place.
Researchers believe that this lone small predator volcano may have been swept into deeper waters by a flood of volcanic ash from a low house on the island’s edge. It lies at an odd angle in death compared to its neighbors, who were all flattened and forever preserved in that direction when flooded.
