Incredibly well-preserved fossils of the oldest swimming jellyfish, which lived 505 million years ago, were discovered at a famed fossil site in Canada https://t.co/wK5xcItBAh
— CNN (@CNN) August 3, 2023
Thanks to a newly analyzed set of fossils, a paper published Wednesday describes a new species that is possibly the oldest swimming jellyfish known to science.
Back in the 1990s, Royal Ontario Museum researchers unearthed more than 170 jellyfish fossils from the Raymond Quarry in British Columbia. The quarry is part of the Burgess shale, a fossil-rich site in the Canadian Rockies that contains the best record we have of Cambrian animal fossils.
“If you see a jellyfish outside of the water, a couple hours later it’s just a ball of goo,” said Jean-Bernard Caron, a paleontologist at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, to the New York Times. This explains how, despite originating from one of the oldest branches of the animal family tree and likely being the first muscle-powered swimmers in the ocean, ancient jellyfish are notoriously difficult to find in the fossil record. What little we do know has been gleaned from studying microscopic fossilized larval stages and molecular studies from living jellyfish.
In a paper published on Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Dr. Caron and his co-authors posited that the 505-million-year-old animals found at Raymond Quarry were a new species, called Burgessomedusa phasmiformis.
Resembling a large, swimming jellyfish, Burgessomedusa was one of the larger creatures in its environment with a nearly eight-inch long body. It also sported upwards of 90 finger-like tentacles that allowed it to capture relatively large prey. One specimen studied in the paper had a trilobite lodged inside its bell.
According to the authors of the study, Burgessomedusa phasmiformis demonstrates that the Cambrian food chain was much more complex than previously thought. “This discovery leaves no doubt they were swimming about at that time,” Joe Moysiuk, a paleontology student at the University of Toronto and a co-author of the study, told The Guardian.
In the same interview, Caron added, “This adds yet another remarkable lineage of animals that the Burgess Shale has preserved chronicling the evolution of life on Earth.”
