Fishy origin of bizarre fossil ‘monster’

Scientists say a worm-like fossil with mysterious origins is actually the ancestor of living fish.

The 300 million-year-old animal was found at an Illinois mine in 1958 by fossil collector Francis Tully.

The “Tully monster” has been a puzzle to scientists ever since, and has been likened to worms and molluscs.

US researchers say the fossil is a backboned animal rather than an invertebrate as once thought, based on an analysis of 1,000 museum specimens.

Their findings, published in Nature, place it firmly on the tree of life of vertebrates and related to fish such as lamprey and hagfish.

It has a rudimentary backbone, which has been misinterpreted in the past as a trace of gut, said Victoria McCoy of Yale University.

“The Tully Monster is very weird looking but we found it is related to modern lamprey,” she told BBC News.

“It shows us how evolution can take something very familiar and make it very weird without changing what we know about the tree of life.”

source:BBC News

Posted by admin on Mar 17 2016. Filed under News at Now. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry