More than 500 million years before Matt Groening and “The Simpsons” introduced us Blink, A mutated fish with an extra eye that swims through the old fish in Springfield, chased a three -eyed predator to prey through the seas of the Cambrian period. As soon as it had caught its quarry, a pair would finish the work covered with spine and a circular mouth covered with teeth.
Known as Mosura Fentoni, this being is a worthy addition to the Bizarre Bestiary Saved in the Burgess Shale, a substantial fossil deposit in the Canadian Rockies. The Anatomy of the Animal, however, described on Wednesday in the magazine Royal Society Open ScienceIt may reveal that Mosura may not be as strange when it looks.
The first Mosura copy was dug up more than a century ago by the paleontologist Charles Walcott, who discovered the Burgess Shale in 1909. In de afgelopen decennia hebben paleontologen in het Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto de critites in Toronto in Toronto geklachten op de critites die ze hebben geklachten op de criters die ze hebben geklachten op de criters die ze bij de critites hebben geklacht en die helpt op de criters in de criters die ze hebben geklachten op de criters die ze bij de critites hebben ontdekt en die helpt ze op de Criters.
They were not fish, but it was clear that sea mocks were related to Radiodonts, a group of ancestral arthropods who dominated Cambrian food chains. But a further inspection of the animal would not happen until a series of Mosura copies was dug up in Marble Canyon in 2012, a foothills of Burgess Shale.
“Having this collection of both old and new copies made us into gear to finally sort this animal,” said Joseph Moysiuk, a paleontologist who studied the Marmeren Canyon fossils as a doctoral student.
Dr. Moysiuk collaborated with his adviser in the Royal Ontario Museum, Jean-Bernard Caron, to investigate around 60 nautical motion. Just like other Burgess Shales, many Mosura copies were well preserved, while retaining functions such as digestive channels and blood circulation. Some even had traces of nerve bundles in each of the three eyes of the being.
The team photographed the Mosura samples under polarized light to record the detailed anatomy of the flattened fossils.
A determining feature of living arthropods is the distribution of their bodies into specialized parts. Shellfish such as scratches, for example, have adjusted various appendices to perform certain functions, such as food or walking. Fossils from many early ancestors of the Arthropod, including other radiodonts, reveal relatively simple body plans. Researchers have therefore long proposed that segmentation took a long time to evolve.
Mosura Bucks this trend. Although it was measured only 2.5 centimeters long, the body of the being was divided into no fewer than 26 segments.
“It is something we have never seen in this group of animals before,” said Dr. Moysiuk, who is now in the Manitoba Museum in Winnipeg, “not only in terms of the large number of segments, but also in terms of how they distinguish from other parts of the body.”
In addition to its wide swimming flaps, the animal owned a highly segmented trunk at the back of his body full of gills. According to the researchers, this region looks like the abdominal structures that horseshoe crab, Woodlice and some insects use to breathe.
Optimizing the intake of oxygen would have been vital for an active predator such as Mosura. The researchers state that the animal has chased small prey through the open water. It probably also had to shoot away from larger contemporaries such as the two foot long Anomalocaris or the Spaceship-shaped titanokorys.
Because no other radiodon had such a specialized trunk, the researchers placed Mosura within his own group. And instead of naming the animal afterwards Those three -eyed cartoon fishThe team got inspiration from another pop culture reference, Mothra, the winged Nemesis of Godzilla. According to Dr. Moysiuk is the name a nod both the nickname of the being and the permanent popularity of Burgess Shale beasts in Japan.
The team observed other remarkable characteristics in Mosura, including dark, reflective spots in the body and swimming flaps of the being. The researchers state that these gaps represent: internal cavities that held the blood of the animal after it was pumped from his tubelic heart.
However, not all researchers are convinced that these signs represent fossilized blood bags. According to Joanna Wolfe, a paleontologist at Harvard University who was not involved in the new newspaper, they could represent other functions, such as intestinal glands.
Although some of the characteristics of Mosura are possible for a scientific debate, Dr. Caron that the body segments of this old marine animal make his connection with living areas. “It is indeed a very strange animal,” he said, “but perhaps not necessarily so strange as it initially looks.”
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