Amongst thousands of impressions in a large rock surface, one stood out from the crowd. The imprint of a tough tubular exoskeleton topped with waving tentacles, now frozen in time, looked strikingly familiar, unlike any of its neighbors.
It looked just like a relative of corals, anemones, and jellyfish from a sediment layer dated 20 million years before Cnidaria like these were thought to exist.paleontologist Frankie Dunn from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
The rock itself is already regarded as truly ancient, dating to around 557 to 562 million years old. It was a time of truly odd creatures, long before the rich biodiversity of theThe researchers took a cast of the textured rock for study. Amid the thousands of impressions depicting an assortment of ancient life forms, one looked less alien than the rest. In fact, it looked a little too much like life we'd see today.
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