See inside the 580-million-year-old creature no one understands

[Judi Lynn]

25 July 2017


“This is the first look inside such a unique specimen of a rangeomorph,” says Alana Sharp of University College London, who led the team conducting the scans. “What has been made visible are internal structures like a central core.”

Changing fruit

From an initial examination of the same fossil in 2013, Sharp’s colleagues concluded that its six fern-like fronds looked like flat fins protruding out at equal distances from a central axis, like a starfruit with six segments.

The new analysis updates that description. The scans shows that one of the three fronds had a three-dimensional shape, more like an inflated balloon than a flat fin. The other two fronds are flatter, but probably only because they were squashed during fossilisation.

More:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2141777-see-inside-the-580-million-year-old-creature-no-one-understands/?utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=ILC&utm_campaign=webpush&cmpid=ILC%257CNSNS%257C2016-GLOBAL-webpush-Ediacarans

[Oubaas]

1. For a Minute There...

Cripes, when I first saw the title I thought my doctor had published my x-rays!

[Warpy]

2. I think at that point in evolution, the distinction wasn't important

and the line between plant and animal was most likely very blurred. An animal that used bladders to float near the surface of water and used photosynthesis? Why the hell not? The sediment could have been ballast keeping it upright or it could have descended to the bottom at night to feed on whatever was down there or dodge nocturnal predators. Whatever it was had 100 million years to evolve before the Ordovician-Silurian mass extinction event wiped them all out, whatever they'd evolved into.

It's an interesting critter, whatever it is.

While I sincerely doubt time travel and going back and taking photos of these things will ever be possible, perhaps one day we'll be able to reverse the fossilization process well enough to get a better handle on what some of this stuff might have been.