Scientists Discover Fossilized… Embryos?

cambrian embryo fossils

I am a huge fan of the facebook page “I Fucking Love Science,” and follow them there. I receive notifications and whatnot from the page and then I go and check out what has been shared.

This week in science, scientists made a huge discovery- they found five hundred million year old fossilized embryos. Not human, mind you, but sea marine life.

For the first 3.4 billion years that life existed on Earth, organisms were very simple and slow to evolve. Then, suddenly, for the next eighty million years, an explosion of evolution occurred, with organisms evolving rapidly and swiftly becoming more complex. This sparked countless new marine species evolving. This occurred during the Cambrian period and resulted in a larger biodiversity for that time period.

Just A Little Background, First.

What is the Cambrian Period?

The Cambrian Period is an important period in the history of life on Earth- and that is because this is when most of life on Earth begins to appear on the fossil record.

Here are some key points concerning life during the Cambrian Period:

  • Almost every metazoan phylum with hard parts and even many that lacked hard parts made its appearance here.
  • Many major groups appeared within a span of forty million years.
  • Animals were developing new ecological niches and strategies.
  • This period saw the diversification and appearance of various mineralized algae types.

This period is also referred to as the Cambrian Explosion.

Now, Back to The News At Hand.

More than 140 fossilized embryos of soft bodied marine life were found by a team of researchers led by James Schiffbauer, from the University of Missouri.

James Shciffbauer had this to say in a press release concerning the discovery:

?The Cambrian Period, which occurred between 540 million and 485 million years ago, ushered in the advent of shells.?Over time, shells and exoskeletons can be fossilized, giving scientists clues into how organisms existed millions of years ago. This adaptation provided protection and structural integrity for organisms. My work focuses on those harder-to-find, soft-tissue organisms that weren’t preserved quite as easily and aren’t quite as plentiful.”

These fossils were retrieved from the Cambrian Shuijingtuo Formation in South China. Due to the different processes that occur chemically when a soft tissue fossil is preserved versus a hard tissue fossil, scientists now have a unique opportunity to study the animal’s body plain.

The theory, according to Schiffbauer is that:

?Something obviously went wrong in these fossils. Our Earth has a pretty good way of cleaning up after things die. Here, the cells? self-destructive mechanisms didn’t happen, and these soft tissues could be preserved. While studying the fossils we collected, we found over 140 spherically shaped fossils, some of which include features that are reminiscent of division stage embryos, essentially frozen in time.?

While fossilized embryos have been discovered before, these are smaller and could possibly be an unidentified as of yet species of animal from the Cambrian Explosion.

Edited/Published by: SB