Peering back hundreds of millions of years into the past can turn up some astonishing findings – as it has with the discovery of a second species of opabiniid, a soft-bodied arthropod with a segmented exoskeleton that lived on the seafloor during t
, the researchers behind the latest study decided to do some more digging. The team compared thefossil with 43 other fossils, plus 11 living taxa, covering arthropods, radiodonts, and other panarthropods.
Due to their similarities, it was originally thought that opabiniids and radiodonts had the same common ancestor, and were grouped as so-called 'dinocarids'. However, in the last 15 years or so, more tools for studying evolutionary history have been developed – and just as importantly, several new species of radiodonts have been found, highlighting the differences between these creatures and opabiniids.
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