Fossil might remedy thriller of what one of many weirdest ever animals ate

One of many weirdest animals that ever lived might have been a scavenger. A re-examination of fossils first described within the Seventies appears to point out a swarm of Hallucigenia feeding on the corpse of a comb jelly.

Hallucigenia was a small animal, as much as 5 centimetres lengthy. It had a worm-like physique with a number of legs, in addition to lengthy, sharp spines on its again. Due to its peculiar look, palaeontologists at first reconstructed the animal upside-down, supposing the spines to be legs.

It lived within the deep seas in the course of the Cambrian interval (about 539 million to 487 million years in the past), when many main animal teams emerged. Hallucigenia was first recognized in rocks from the Burgess Shale deposits in British Columbia, Canada. It’s associated to velvet worms, tardigrades and arthropods (the group that features bugs and spiders).

Little is understood in regards to the historic animal’s life-style. For example, not one of the Hallucigenia fossils discovered thus far have preserved intestine contents, so we don’t know what they ate.

Javier Ortega-Hernández at Harvard College re-examined a fossil from the Burgess Shale that was utilized in the unique description of Hallucigenia in 1977, however which hadn’t been checked out since.

It’s the stays of a soft-bodied, gelatinous organism, 3.5 cm by 1.9 cm, which has been severely broken. Ortega-Hernández recognized it as a comb jelly, or ctenophore.

Scattered over the comb jelly, Ortega-Hernández recognized Hallucigenia spines, representing seven people. He suggests the comb jelly died and sank to the ocean mattress, the place the Hallucigenia swarmed on it and fed, in all probability by suction feeding. Whereas they had been doing this, they had been all buried in mud and ultimately fossilised.

Ortega-Hernández declined to be interviewed by New Scientist as a result of the paper hasn’t but been peer-reviewed.

“I believe it’s a convincing ecological interplay,” says palaeontologist Allison Daley on the College of Lausanne in Switzerland. She calls it a “snapshot”, representing “a second in time that possibly solely lasted some minutes or hours that occurred to be caught within the fossil report”.

Hallucigenia is understood to have lived in deep water, says Daley, and vitamins are scarce within the depths. It is sensible that the species survived by rapidly discovering and consuming wealthy meals sources like a lifeless comb jelly. “Suction feeding could be very efficient on such a delicate animal,” she says.

Jean-Bernard Caron on the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto is much less satisfied. Simply because the Hallucigenia and ctenophore fossils are discovered collectively, he says, doesn’t essentially imply they had been interacting in actual life. It might be that undersea mudslides carried them to the identical resting place.

As a result of a lot of the recognized Hallucigenia fossils are simply spines, Caron suggests an alternate interpretation: the animals might have moulted, shedding their skins to develop.

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