The fossil of an ancient sea squirt found in a collection at the Utah Museum of Natural History turned out to be the oldest of its kind.
A stunningly-preserved, half-billion year old fossil of a strange Cambrian creature could shift our understanding of how a sister group to vertebrates evolved, a new study suggests.
The newly discovered fossil offers the"best possible window into what early tunicates looked like, what they lived like, what their ecology was, their lifestyle, and that in turn lets us make some inferences about what early tunicates and early vertebrates may have shared in common," study co-author Karma Nanglu, a postdoctoral fellow at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, told Live Science.
Evolutionary cluesStudy co-authors Javier Ortega-Hernández and Rudy Lerosey-Aubril, assistant professor of organismic and evolutionary biology and research associate, both at Harvard University, stumbled upon the newly described fossil in a collection stored at the Utah Museum of Natural History. Nanglu recognized tell-tale tunicate features: a barrel-shaped body and siphoe-like growths, and — most notably — the dark bands striping through its body.
"What this tunicate tells us is that tunicates ancestrally were most likely to be animals that had a lava form like a tadpole and then metamorphosed into a barrel-shaped animal that had these two siphons pointing up into the water column,” Nanglu said.
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