It’s amazing what mysterious creatures scientists find in the fossil records of life on our planet. Jonathan Webb describes one such creature at the BBC.
“A 430 million-year-old sea creature apparently dragged its offspring around on strings like kites — a baffling habit not seen anywhere else in the animal kingdom.
“Scientists who discovered the fossil have dubbed it the ‘kite runner.’ Ten capsules tethered to its back appear to contain juvenile progeny, all at different stages of development.
“Reported in the journal PNAS, the many-legged, eyeless, 1 centimeter [fossil] was dug up from a site in Herefordshire before being taken to Oxford and computerised. This process involved grinding away the specimen, slice by slice, and photographing each of those sections to assemble a 3D reconstruction. …
” ‘You take its anatomy, code it into a data set and then run probabilistic methods on it, which will tell you how likely it is that something evolved in a particular way,’ [David Legg, a palaeontologist from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History,] explained. …
” ‘Nothing is known today that attaches the young by threads to its upper surface,’ said co-author Derek Briggs, from Yale University. …
“It was the variety of shapes seen among the 10 tethered babies that Dr Legg found most convincing. ‘We see them develop and begin to resemble the adult form more and more, as they get bigger,’ he said. ‘I’m definitely convinced that that’s what they were.’ ”
More at the BBC, here.
Photo: D Briggs/D Siveter/ Sutton/D Legg
This tiny, eyeless fossil creature, unrelated to any living species, carried babies in capsules tethered to its back.
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