A treasure trove of fossils rewrites the story of early life

https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-treasure-trove-of-cambrian-fossils-rewrites-the-story-of-early-life-20260501/

by worldvoyageur • 3 months ago

108 24 3 months ago

quantamagazine.org

wewewedxfgdf• 3 months ago

The Cambrian period has to be the most interesting period in Earth's history.

A close second is the period where the monkeys started wearing clothes, driving cars and programming computers.

nntwozz• 3 months ago

We're apes, friend.

thejohnconway• 3 months ago

Apes are a subset of monkeys.

tokai2• 3 months ago

Top pendantry. The words are interchangeable in daily speech. This is a comment section, not a journal.

m0llusk• 3 months ago

It turns out to be more interesting than that. For example, there is no other ape with skin resembling that of marine mammals. And that is just a start. Mankind is seriously weird.

greenbit2• 3 months ago

Or maybe just before that, when they started wearing digital watches.

Cpoll• 3 months ago

The first digital watch was from 1972.

simonh• 3 months ago

While as a species we may have moved on from thinking digital watches are a really neat idea, some of us will always remain stuck in the past.

compiler-devel• 3 months ago

If we’re just another animal that can program computers, then I don’t feel bad about the take over of AI and LLMs as we’re nothing special in the evolutionary climb upwards.

dkga• 3 months ago

What a treasure indeed! I just didn‘t understand why this particular site had so well-preserved soft tissue fossils? I assume it is probably related to the geology of the site during formation of the fossils, and probably the researchers themselves are not quite sure. But I would love to know more, if anyone here understands about this sort of thing.

arnsholt• 3 months ago

If I had to guess, they probably have some ideas. In Your inner fish (an excellent book, BTW) Neil Shubin has an afterword where he describes roughly how they went about deciding where to look for Tiktaalik. Basically, you start with whatever thing you want to find out more about; in the case of Tiktaalik, the transition of tetrapods from aquatic to terrestrial living. So you start by finding out where you have exposed sedimentary rocks of the correct age likely to be contain fossils. Next, you also need to the rocks to expose the right kind of environment: desert sands or deep ocean environments aren't going to help you find Tiktaalik, for that you need shallow waters and intertidal zones. Finally, it needs to be somewhere you can get to. So in this case, I wouldn't be surprised if they were purposefully looking for soft body preservation (especially since I think Cambrian fauna generally was quite soft and squishy).

From memory, to get fossilised soft tissues you want the remains to be buried extremely rapidly in an environment where the soft tissues don't decay (typically an anoxic environment, so for a shale basically covered in mud). So a mudslide is one option, and I think there are some lovely fossils North American from the end of the Cretaceous that are hypothesised to have been buried by the tidal wave caused by the Chicxulub impact.

Edit: After some googling, the Cretaceous fossils I was thinking of is Tanis,[0] which is in fact plausibly (but not universally) thought to be covered by the earthquake caused by the impact, before the tidal wave arrived.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanis_(fossil_site)

alehlopeh• 3 months ago

Start with whatever thing you want to know more about. Then draw the rest of the owl

cess11• 3 months ago

"the first major blossoming of modern biodiversity."

What does "modern" mean in this discourse?

tokai2• 3 months ago

Life before the Cambrian was weird, and does not fit neatly with the type of live and diversity we see from the Cambrian til now.

throwup238• 3 months ago

Most of the major phyla that exist today established themselves during the Cambrian explosion.

astrobe_• 3 months ago

So "modern" is a synonym for "current" here, if one puts aside warnings about its decline due to human activity?

stefs• 3 months ago

unrelated: https://fossil-scm.org/

pfdietz• 3 months ago

Two YouTube channels for those interested in this sort of thing:

https://www.youtube.com/@lifethroughtime1811

https://www.youtube.com/@virtualseminarsinprecambri4856

A treasure trove of fossils rewrites the story of early life

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