Cambrian Explosion: early form fills a gap (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, October 13, 2022, 16:37 (562 days ago) @ David Turell

This worm-like form fills a gap in one branch of evolution in the Cambrian era:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ancient-worm-evolution-missing-link

"An ancient, armored worm may be the key to unraveling the evolutionary history of a diverse collection of marine invertebrates.

"Discovered in China, a roughly 520-million-year-old fossil of the newly identified worm, dubbed Wufengella, might be the missing link between three of the phyla that constitute a cadre of sea creatures called lophophorates.

"Based on a genetic analysis, Wufengella is probably the common ancestor that connects brachiopods, bryozoans and phoronid worms, paleontologist Jakob Vinther and colleagues report September 27 in Current Biology.

“'We had been speculating that [the common ancestor] may have been some wormy animal that had plates on its back,” says Vinther, of the University of Bristol in England. “But we never had the animal.”

"An ancient, armored worm may be the key to unraveling the evolutionary history of a diverse collection of marine invertebrates.

"Discovered in China, a roughly 520-million-year-old fossil of the newly identified worm, dubbed Wufengella, might be the missing link between three of the phyla that constitute a cadre of sea creatures called lophophorates.

"Based on a genetic analysis, Wufengella is probably the common ancestor that connects brachiopods, bryozoans and phoronid worms, paleontologist Jakob Vinther and colleagues report September 27 in Current Biology.

“'We had been speculating that [the common ancestor] may have been some wormy animal that had plates on its back,” says Vinther, of the University of Bristol in England. “But we never had the animal".

***

"A fossil like Wufengella had long been high on Vinther’s bucket list of fossils that he and his colleagues hoped to find. But “we always thought, ‘Well, we probably will never see that in real life,’” he says. Typically, such a creature would have spent its life in shallow water. Organisms don’t tend to preserve well there, decaying faster due to exposure to lots of oxygen. Vinther suggests that the Wufengella that his team found probably washed out to deep water in a storm.

"Now that the researchers have found one Wufengella, they hope to find more, in part to see if there are other varieties. And perhaps the team could identify even more distant ancestors further back on the tree of life that might connect lophophorates with other animal groups such as mollusks, Vinther says, further fleshing out how life on Earth is connected."

Comment: a great new find which may explain a gap in fossils of this special branch. It fits dhw's erstwhile wish to fill the whole Cambrian gap, but all it does it help fill a small gap inside the Cambrian era. The giant Cambrian gap remains intact.