Extremely detailed Cambrian fossils show that enigmatic skeleton tubes belonged to ancient ancestors of modern jellyfish.
Over 500 million years ago, sea-dwelling invertebrates pioneered a new evolutionary experiment: skeletons. But while those durable, tubelike structures stood the test of time as fossils, the animals' soft bodies decayed and vanished, erasing all evidence of what these ancient animals may have looked like. Now, a recent reexamination of those ancient skeletal tubes has finally unveiled the identity of one of these mysterious organisms.
However, tracing the evolutionary history of these early exoskeletons has proved tricky."Soft tissues tend to decay away," Xiaoya Ma, an invertebrate paleontologist at Yunnan University in China and co-author of a study describing the findings, told Live Science.
Soft-bodied invertebrates are hard to find in the fossil record, and jellyfish in particular are almost never preserved."This fossil was a double whammy in terms of rarity," Luke Parry, a paleobiologist at the University of Oxford and co-author of the study, told Live Science in an email.Normally, when a marine organism dies, scavengers and bacteria make quick work of its soft tissues.
These characteristics led the team to conclude that G. aspera likely belonged to the phylum Cnidaria, which includes modern-day jellyfish, corals and sea anemones. It also laid to rest an older theory that the creature was an annelid worm, which is defined by its segmented body and gut with two openings.
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