Unraveling Evolutionary History: The 300 Million-Year-Old ‘Caterpillar’ Fossil
A fossil that was misidentified as a caterpillar for a century has now been revealed as the first-known nonmarine lobopodian, leading to a significant rewrite of our understanding of early animal evolution. This groundbreaking discovery was made by Harvard researcher Richard Knecht while examining specimens in the Museum of Comparative Zoology and was published in Communications Biology.
The creature, known as Palaeocampa anthrax, was originally described in 1865 and had shuffled between classifications as a worm, millipede, and marine creature for 130 years. Advanced imaging techniques revealed it was actually a lobopodian – an extinct soft-bodied creature that bridges the evolutionary gap between primitive worms and modern arthropods like insects and crustaceans.
Measuring just four centimeters long, this spiny creature lived in freshwater environments around 300 million years ago. This predates famous marine lobopodians from Canada’s Burgess Shale by nearly 50 million years. The discovery also confirms that France’s Montceau-les-Mines fossil site was a freshwater ecosystem, not marine as previously thought.
“Lobopodians were likely a common sight on Paleozoic sea beds, but apart from microscopic tardigrades and terrestrial velvet worms, we thought they were confined to the ocean,” said Knecht, now at the University of Michigan.
Source: ScienceDaily