They discover a Devonian fossil ‘that came back from the dead’

July 10 () –

Well preserved remains of a mysterious and extremely rare animal, a “carpoid”, have been identified among the Devonian period rocks of the Penn Dixie deposit, New York state.

The remains, which date back approximately 382 million years, are of a small invertebrate that lived in the ancient ocean that covered this region of the present-day United States. long before dinosaurs existed.

Carpoids are extinct echinoderms; they are related to starfish, urchins, sea lilies (crinoids), and sand dollars. The discovery of rock carpoid fossils from this particular era was unexpected, according to a statement from the site.

Carpoids first appeared during the Middle Cambrian Period about 500 million years ago. They are rare, and their fossil record is patchy, making it difficult to trace their evolutionary history. They are often not between their first and last appearance on the rock record, making them a “ghost lineage”: They were there but we just don’t see them. However, we know that the animal was alive because we found its ancestors and descendants separated in the fossil record, perhaps by tens of millions of years.

Preliminary identification of the newly discovered fossils suggests that they belong to the class of echinoderms known as solutes, a branch of the carpoids that was thought to have gone extinct around 410 million years ago during the Early Devonian period. If initial interpretations are confirmed, then the new fossils would be placed at approximately 382 million years, extending the geological range of solutes by more than 25 million years.

These carpoids are a “Lazarus taxon”: an animal that disappears from the fossil record and reappears much later. Like the Biblical Lazarus rising from the dead, a Lazarus taxon figuratively rises from the graveyard of global extinction.