Jellyfish might be famous for all the wrong reasons : stinging you on holidayand waft through the ocean resembling afried eggwith no need for a brain or an anus . However , these funky creatures have been float through Earth ’s seas for a farsighted retentive time and stand for one of the earliest branches of diverse beast .
With their squashy body , long tentacles , and being around 95 pct water , jellyfish are not typically preserved well in the fossil record and researchers have questions about how certain feature and adaptations within different jellyfish group have develop . Now , a new fogey calledBurgessomedusa phasmiformisis the old example of a free - swimming medusoid in the fossil platter and it has 90 tentacle to boot .
“ Although man-of-war and their relatives are consider to be one of the earliest fauna groups to have evolve , they have been remarkably hard to pin down in the Cambrian fossil record . This discovery result no doubt they were drown about at that meter , ” said co - author Joe Moysiuk , a PhD candidate in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto , in astatement .
Burgessomedusa phasmiformis jellyfish and the top arthropod predator Anomalocaris canadensis.Image Credit: Photo by Desmond Collins. © Royal Ontario Museum
At the Royal Ontario Museum ( ROM ) , over 170 body fossils from the Cambrian Burgess Shale , Canada , were study . The new jellyfish is thought to have been around 20 centimeters ( 8 inch ) tall and possessed 90 short , digit - similar tentacles . The specimen were mostly found in the eighties and 1990s . The presence of tentacles in the species suggest that this was a free - swimming predatory jellyfish that could have take on tidy prey .
“ find such fabulously frail beast preserved in rock layers on top of these mountains is such a wonderous find . Burgessomedusaadds to the complexity of Welsh foodwebs , and likeAnomalocariswhich survive in the same environment , these man-of-war were effective swimming predators , ” say co - author , Dr Jean - Bernard Caron , ROM ’s Richard Ivey Curator of Invertebrate Palaeontology . “ This add together yet another noteworthy lineage of animals that the Burgess Shale has preserved chronicle the evolution of life on Earth . ”
The squad think that this old man-of-war bear witness that complex living cycles in this group of jellys likely evolve during theCambrian detonation .
Jellyfish life story cycle per second are unco complex with a polyp stage that makes get on and classifying dissimilar metal money quite crafty . Ancient species of Cnidarians , which let in the Portuguese man-of-war , would have been either stalked ( attached at one close ) or devoid - swimming . Finding a 500 - million - year - old free - swim man-of-war with a typical bell - mold torso helps scientist found when this lifestyle might have evolved .
The theme is published inProceedings of the Royal Society B : Biological Sciences .
