520-Million-Year-Old Sea Monster Had 18 Mouth Tentacles

By Laura Geggel, Associate Editor | March 22, 2019 07:10am ET

The discovery of a fossil showing an ancient sea creature with 18 tentacles surrounding its mouth has helped to solve a modern-day mystery about the origins of a gelatinous carnivore called a comb jelly, a new study finds.

The previously unknown "sea monster," which scientists dubbed Daihua sanqiong, lived a whopping 518 million years ago in what is now China. And the extinct animal shares a number of anatomical characteristics with the modern comb jelly, a little sea creature that uses so-called comb rows full of loads of hair-like cilia to swim through the oceans.

The discovery suggests that this newfound species may be the comb jelly's distant relative, said study lead researcher Jakob Vinther, a paleobiologist at Bristol University in the United Kingdom. [Photos: Ancient Shrimp-Like Critter Was Tiny But Fierce] 

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Bizarre fossil hauled its offspring around 'like kites'

By Jonathan Webb

Science reporter, BBC News

4 April 2016 

The ten capsules presumably bobbed behind the animal like balloons as it scuttled along the sea floor

A 430 million-year-old sea creature apparently dragged its offspring around on strings like kites - a baffling habit not seen anywhere else in the animal kingdom.

Scientists who discovered the fossil have dubbed it the "kite runner".

Ten capsules tethered to its back appear to contain juvenile progeny, all at different stages of development.

Reported in the journal PNAS, the many-legged, eyeless, 1cm animal is not directly related to any living species.

"There isn't an animal today that it's essentially related to," David Legg, a palaeontologist from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, told BBC News.

"It's what we refer to as being on a stem lineage. So it belongs to a group that would have evolved and diversified before the modern groups did."

In fact, Dr Legg added, although it clearly had the segmented body and exoskeleton of an arthropod, it was quite a job to figure out precisely where to position the little beast on the evolutionary tree.

"Often you can look at a particular animal and say, that belongs to this group or that group. This one - we had no clue."

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Giant sea creature hints at early arthropod evolution

Date:

March 12, 2015

Source:

Yale University

Summary:

Newly discovered fossils of a giant, extinct sea creature show it had modified legs, gills on its back, and a filter system for feeding -- providing key evidence about the early evolution of arthropods.

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