500 million year-old fossils reveal answer to evolutionary riddle UniofOxford RSocPublishing
Artist's reconstruction of Gangtoucunia aspera as it would have appeared in life on the Cambrian seafloor, circa 514 million years ago. The individual in the foreground has part of the skeleton removed to show the soft polyp inside the skeleton. Reconstruction by Xiaodong Wang. Credit: Reconstruction by Xiaodong Wang.
These are features found today only in modern jellyfish, anemones and their close relatives , organisms whose soft parts are extremely rare in the fossil record. The study shows that these simple animals was among the first to build the hard skeletons that make up much of the knownAccording to the researchers, Gangtoucunia would have looked similar to modern scyphozoan jellyfish polyps, with a hard tubular structure anchored to the underlying substrate.
The new specimens clearly demonstrate that Gangtoucunia was not related to annelid worms as had been previously suggested for similar fossils. It is now clear that Gangtoucunia's body had a smooth exterior and a gut partitioned longitudinally, whereas annelids have segmented bodies with transverse partitioning of the body.
Although the fossil clearly shows that Gangtoucunia was a primitive jellyfish, this doesn't rule out the possibility that other early tube-species looked very different. From Cambrian rocks in Yunnan province, the research team have previously found well-preserved tube fossils that could be identified as priapulids , lobopodians and annelids.
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