Scienceblogtwo

A well-preserved fossilized worm from 518 million years ago has been found by an international team of scientists, including researchers from the Universities of Bristol and Oxford and the Natural History Museum, to resemble the ancestor of three significant groups of living creatures. The fossil worm, known as Wufengella and discovered in China, was a stubby creature with a half-inch long body covered in a dense, regularly overlapping array of plates on its back. It belonged to an extinct class of shelled animals known as tommotiids. A fleshy body with several side-projecting flattened lobes surrounded the asymmetrical armour. Between the lobes and the armor, bundles of bristles protruded from the body. The worm was previously serialized or segmented, like an earthworm, as evidenced by the numerous lobes, bundles of bristles, and array of shells on the back. The results have been published in the journal Current Biology today. Dr. Jakob Vinther, a study co-author from the School of Ea...

The year-round presence of marine predators in the eastern Great Australian Bight, such as various whale species and white sharks that are popular among cage divers and Jaws-inspired filmmakers, has been better understood by oceanographers.                                                                                                    Scientists from Flinders University and the South Australian Research and Development Institute have described the deep subsurface phytoplankton layers deep beneath the eastern part of the Bight for the first time (SARDI). Even when the surface phytoplankton blooms vanish during specific periods of the upwelling season, these layers continue to support the rich marine biodiversity. According to Alex Shute, a...

According to recent studies, tetrapods' evolution was constrained for millions of years because their skulls had fewer bones than extinct and current fish. Tetrapods have more intricate connections between their skull bones than fish, according to research on fossilized animal skulls during the transition from an aquatic to a terrestrial environment. These alterations to skull structure didn't help to promote the diversification of terrestrial life; instead, they hindered the development of tetrapod skulls. Tetrapods were the first land animals with limbs and digits and diverged from fish about 400 million years ago. From amphibians to humans, they are the ancestors of all living things. To better understand how skulls altered as tetrapods evolved, the study, which was released on September 9 in the journal Science Advances, quantified the arrangement of skull bones in over 100 extant and extinct creatures. Researchers from the University of Bristol, Barcelona's Universitat...