One stood out in a crowd of thousands of impressions. It looked like the same thing as it did when it was frozen in time.
It looked like a descendant of corals, anemones, and jellyfish that were thought to have existed in the past.
It's not like anything else we've found in the fossil record.
It's not known how extinct body plans are related to living animals. This one clearly has a skeleton, with densely packed tentacles that would have waved around in the water, like coral and sea anemones do today.
Outline overlaying the fossil imprint. (BGS/UKRI)
The discovery was made in 2007, when researchers from the British Geological Society removed debris from a slab of rock at the Bradgate formation.
The rock is thought to be over 500 million years old, making it the oldest rock in the world. It was a time of strange creatures, long before the rich diversity of the Cambrian Explosion assembled body plans.
They took a cast of the rock. One of the ancient life forms looked less alien than the rest. It looked like life we would see today.
The 20-centimeter long cnidarian is the earliest example of a predator.
The explosion was amazing. For the next half a billion years, the anatomy of living animal groups was fixed.
The discovery shows that the body plan of the cnidarians was fixed at least 20 million years ago.
There are very alien fossils that have no resemblance to anything currently living. This time period is believed to be the dawn of modern animals. The seeds of at least one animal group were the first to be planted, just in time for it to flourish and grow.
The animal's name was named Auroralumina because it looked like a dawn lantern. They named it after Sir David Attenborough, who hunted for fossils as a boy.
The predator is over 500 million years old. BGS/UKri.
Unlike early Cambrian cnidarians, this strange but familiar creature is not ornamented.
The earliest creature to have a skeleton is this one. "So far we've only found one, but it's exciting to know there must be others out there, holding the key to when complex life began."
The team suspects that Auroralumina attenboroughii doesn't have the free-swimming medusa stage of its life cycle.
The researchers think that this lonely little predator may have been swept into deeper water by a flood of volcanic ash. It is at an odd angle compared to its neighbors who were all flattened when the flood hit.
The research was published in a journal.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
