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Bizarre ancient sea-creature discovery

by Josef Kafka

Scientists have established that one of Earth’s most bizarre-looking creatures definitely had a face. A tiny sea creature known as Hallucigenia sparsa lived around 500 million years ago, was thinner than a hair, and vaguely resembled a prickly worm. Once one of Earth’s most common animals, the odd critter has baffled scientists for years as its bizarre anatomical structure left the majority of fossils without heads, and it was considered so odd that many believed it had no modern relatives.

When it was first discovered and studied in the 1970s, it was thought that the 35mm long organism used its long spikes to walk on, with a row of tentacles situated on its back. It was eventually realised that scientists had confused front with back and were picturing it upside down, not to mention that they had no fossilised record of a head. Much of the confusion came from a dark, balloon shaped orb at one end, which has now been recognised as, rather gruesomely, the insides of the animal, squeezed out from the pressure of being buried under layers of mud. However, new fossil specimens found in Canada have revealed the missing part – a strange face. 

Using powerful electron microscope technology, a team led by Dr Martin Smith from Cambridge University identified a pair of simple eyes and a “cheeky” semicircular mouth, with a ring of needle like teeth running down to its stomach, looking back at them from a spoon-shaped head. This discovery finally confirms once and for all which way the animal faced, putting to rest a decades-long paleontological debate. 

It has also shed light on how the primitive creature would have lived. The simple eyes suggest that Hallucigenia would have been able to distinguish between light and dark, but may have struggled to see predators approaching. The odd, smiling mouth would have been used to “suck up” small prey such as plankton, while the scary, needle-like teeth would have been used to direct the food to the stomach to be digested. The teeth are a particularly interesting discovery, as recently Hallucigenia was established as an ancestor of the velvet worm, which is toothless. This suggests that the teeth evolved and were then lost again, adding a new mystery to the relatively uncharted evolutionary history of the genus group called the ecdysozoans.

As well as revealing new information about the genus, which includes animals like anthropods (insects and spiders), velvet worms and water bears, the study tells scientists more about the Cambrian period, a time of rapid evolutionary change as creatures became more complex and diversified. At this time, Earth was very different to the natural variety we see today, with warm seas (which helped support the increasing diversity of life) and barren lands, which supported little more than a few molluscs and was in the process of breaking up from the supercontinent Pannotia. Most life during this period, like Hallucigenia, was aquatic but it was during this evolutionary explosion that most major animal groups first appear in the fossil record, making this discovery incredibly important for our understanding of life on Earth today.

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