Paleontologists found a new species of echinoderm that was halfway through the process of regeneration when it died.
To the untrained eye, the ancient brittle star fossil above looks like what you’d expect of a now-especially-brittle echinoderm. But the fossil is quite rare: It captures the moment at which the brittle star was cloning itself, regenerating three of its arms as it died. The specimen was a chance find during a 2018 dig in a limestone deposit west of Nusplingen, Germany. The same fossil bed yielded ancient sponges, crinoids, and ammonite coprolites and beaks.
Brittle stars are not starfish; though both typically have five arms, they constitute different classes of echinoderms, the same invertebrate group that includes sea cucumbers . Though many brittle stars are five-armed, the study authors note that O. hex “shows a regular six-fold symmetry without any signs of accidental ray addition, suggesting that the individual was hexamerous before fragmentation.
Starfish Echinoderm Crinoid Ophiuroidea Human Interest Gizmodo
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