Last Wednesday, the 2nd, an article was published by the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, in which a major discovery was discussed: species of oldest free-swimming jellyfish in the world already found.
This species was found to contain 90 tentacles, and the fossils analyzed, according to the researchers, are over 505 million years old. This species of jellyfish had a soft body and was made up of more than 95% water.
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Precisely for this reason, it is common for the fossils of these animals to be well preserved. Today we are going to talk a little more about the characteristics, the evolutionand the adaptations of this type of animal and how much it has changed over the years. Follow next!
Even though jellyfish species can be considered the first types of animals that evolved over the years, their fossil record is not so easy to notice.
The discovery of these fossils, however, left no doubt about the type of species that was swimming at that time, according to the researchers.
The ancient species of cnidarians, of which jellyfish are a part, are divided into two groups. The first of these are those that were attached to peduncles, and the second are those that are free-swimming.
(Image: playback / internet)
Finding types of free-swimming jellyfish older than 500 million years in a typical body in the bell shape allows scientists to establish why lifestyles changed and when it started.
The new study that was done with the fossils found has surprised the scientists, after all, it is based on more than 200 fossil specimens already found previously, between the years of 1980 and 1990 in the Burgess Shale, which is in British Columbia, Canada.
This fossil site is held in the custody of the Royal Ontario Museum. The fossils found are a little more than 20 centimeters long and were studied by researchers and scientists at the University of Toronto. They concluded that the species found and studied can be identified as Burgessomedusa pharmiformis.
Because they have tentacles, it is possible that these jellyfish were free-swimming and predatory types that captured other species of animals with very large sizes.
The team of researchers claims that the fossils found can show how complex the life cycle of jellyfish can be and change over the years. It is also possible that this cycle evolved after the explosion of the Cambrian period.
