By Stephanie Pappas, Live Science
Contributor | December 13, 2017 07:50am ET
A set of spherical fossils, each fossil
tinier than a grain of sand, is not what it seemed.
For years, researchers mistook these
537-million-year-old fossils for the embryos of arthropods, the group
that includes insects, spiders and crabs. Now, a closer look reveals they
really belong to the ancestors of jellyfish. What's more, they developed in
very different ways than modern jellyfish, said Philip Donoghue, a
paleobiologist at the University of Bristol in England.
This case of mistaken identity came down to
minuscule lines in the surfaces of the fossils, which originally seemed to be
similar to the segmentation lines on arthropod larvae. Donoghue and his
colleagues were trying to figure out how these segments grew when they
inadvertently discovered the lines weren't larval segments at all.
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