500-Million-Year-Old Fossil Reveals a Worm Covered in Bristles

Paleontologists have found a weird worm-like creature from the Cambrian Period that has options related to three teams of residing animals. Just a half-inch lengthy and coated in bristles, the armored Wufengella is offering clues as to how historic filter-feeders developed.

Wufengella is about 518 million years outdated, timing it towards the tail-finish of the Cambrian explosion. The Cambrian explosion was a interval of exceptional evolutionary diversification in animal life. Life on the seafloor significantly flourished: tank-like filter-feeders developed to inhale jetsam, and sharp-toothed penis worms (they’re really referred to as that) realized to hunt shelter in vacant seafloor shells.

Wufengella is proof of these heady occasions. Its distinctive morphology—from its uneven skeleton and bristles to its flattened lobes—hyperlinks the animal to a few teams of recent life: brachiopods (which look so much like clams), bryozoans (often known as moss animals), and phoronids (horseshoe worms). An evaluation of the worm-like fossil is published at the moment in Current Biology.

“This is an animal we have hoped to find a fossil of for decades,” Jakob Vinther, a paleontologist on the University of Bristol and co-author of the paper, wrote in an e-mail to Gizmodo. “It is truly an anatomical space cadet. It looks like a bastard love-child between a bobbit worm and a gumboot chiton.”

The animal, whose shorthand identify means dancing phoenix, was found in 2019 and excavated from a hill in China’s Yunnan Province. The fossil’s distinctive preservation signifies that particulars of its comfortable tissues are preserved alongside its onerous skeleton.

Vinther (who usually works on comfortable tissues and was a member of the group that recognized a dinosaur’s cloaca final yr) mentioned that Wufengella’s morphology confirms that animals prefer it had rows of plates on their backs, but it surely additionally connects the three extant teams of filter-feeders.

However, Wufengella isn’t a brachiopod, a bryozoan, or a phoronid. All these animals had lophophores, a horseshoe-shaped organ essential for filtering water. The petite Wufengella is (brace your self) a camenellan tommotiid, the previous which means it had a sequence of bristles alongside its physique and the latter which means it’s evolutionarily linked to brachiopods and bryozoans.

“The fossil isn’t a direct ancestor but more like their ancient cousin,” mentioned Luke Parry, a paleontologist on the University of Oxford and a co-author of the analysis, in an e-mail. “It tells us what features were present in the ancestor of lophophorates, in the same way that Archaeopteryx tells us where birds came from.”

Since modern-day lophophorates are affixed to the seafloor, Wufengella exhibits that the animal group developed from a cell organism. But Parry provides that the animal additionally has a extra advanced morphology than its residing cousins—because the animals took up a sedentary existence, they now not wanted our bodies constructed for motion.

Because the Cambrian explosion noticed a lot diversification in so brief a time, it may be tough for paleontologists to know the way animals developed from one another, and what their frequent ancestors could have seemed like.

Wufengella gives solutions for animals with lophophores. And although its type is now not round, the descendants of its cousins are. Under the ocean, relics of the Cambrian are nonetheless filter-feeding their means by means of life.

More: Scientists Find Huge Trove of Marine Fossils from the ‘Cambrian Explosion’ in China