Ancient Sea Animal Looked Like Flower & Had Anus Near Mouth, Researchers Say

By: Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer
Published: 01/17/2013 10:07 AM EST on LiveScience

An ancient sea animal that looked like a flower had its anus right next to its mouth, a new fossil study finds.

The research reveals that this odd marine creature was likely an ancestor of a group known as the entoprocta. Previously, the oldest fossil entoprocta came from the late Jurassic, about 145 million years ago. The new fossils date all the way back to the Cambrian, about 520 million years before the present.

That is near the so-called Cambrian Explosion, when most of the major lineages of animals appeared on the scene, as did complex ecosystems. Some odd animals emerged during this time, such as bizarre shrimplike monsters called anomalocaridids that could grow up to about 6 feet (1.8 meters) in length; a 515-million-year-old predator with compound eyes containing 3,000 lenses; and a 50-legged arthropod that skittered along the seafloor of what is now Canada.

The Cambrian marine animal Cotyledion tylodes in fossil form and as illustrated by artists.

The newfound species, Cotyledion tylodes, has been analyzed before, but the discovery of hundreds of new specimens allowed researchers led by Zhifei Zhang of Northwest University in Xi'an, China, to take a more detailed look. The team analyzed 418 specimens from Yunnan, China. [The 10 Weirdest Animal Discoveries]

They found that C. tylodes lived a lifestyle fixed to one spot, filtering water through a ring of tentacles that surrounded its mouth — and its anus. The two openings sat right next to one another, connected by a U-shaped gut.

That gut proved that the previous classification of C. tylodes as a cnidarian, or jellyfishlike creature, was wrong, the researchers report today (Jan. 17) in the journal Scientific Reports.

Instead, the flowerlike filter feeder was likely an early entoproct, Zhang and colleagues found. The body pattern is almost identical, though the ancient version grew to a length of 0.3 inches to 2.2 inches (8 to 56 millimeters), while today's entoprocts are comparatively tiny at between 0.004 inches and 0.27 inches long (0.1 to 7 mm).

Another big difference between C. tylodes and modern entoprocts is on the outside. Unlike what is found in living entoprocts, the stem and flowerlike feeding cup of the ancient creature were covered by tiny hardened protuberances called sclerites, which may have formed a sort of hard exoskeleton for the creatures.

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Wild Dolphins Give Gifts To Researchers Studying Them In Tangalooma, Australia

'Tis the season for giving, but in Australia, wild dolphins have been documented offering gifts to the researchers studying them for quite some time.

We hope those "gifts" came with a receipt, though, as the offerings seem likely to trigger the gag reflex in some humans. So far, the presents include eels, tuna, squid, at least one octopus and a variety of other fin fish. Discovery News reports the gifts are highly valued food sources for dolphins.

The first gift, from an adult male dolphin named Fred, was a dead moray eel, offered in July 1998, the Daily Mail notes.

According to a recently released report in the journal Anthrozoos: A Multidisciplinary Journal of the Interactions of People & Animals, a group of wild bottlenose dolphins near the resort of Tangalooma, in Australia, have offered gifts to the biologists studying them at least 22 more times since the first incident with Fred. The paper notes that "[gift] giving has become an established but infrequent part of the culture" of that particular group of dolphins.

While food-sharing is not all that uncommon among animals of the same species, inter-species sharing (aside from the dead birds your cat tracks into the house) is a rare occurrence, Discovery News notes.

As of yet, researchers in Australia aren't 100 percent sure what triggered the dolphins' generosity, but according to EarthSky, they believe it may be some form of play behavior. Other explanations include a desire on the dolphins' part to give back, as the researchers have been feeding them for quite some time. The dolphins may also see the researchers as incompetent hunters that require an occasional handout.

(Image courtesy Flickr user Hans Pama)

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