Posted on 09/15/2018 11:10:54 AM PDT by Simon Green
Stephen Pates, a researcher from Oxford University’s Department of Zoology, has uncovered secrets from the ancient oceans.
With Dr Rudy Lerosey-Aubril from New England University (Australia), he meticulously re-examined fossil material collected over 25 years ago from the mountains of Utah, USA. The research, published in a new study in Nature Communications, reveals further evidence of the great complexity of the oldest animal ecosystems.
Twenty hours of work with a needle on the specimen while submerged underwater exposed numerous, delicate microscopic hair-like structures known as setae. This revelation of a frontal appendage with fine filtering setae has allowed researchers to confidently identify it as a radiodont – an extinct group of stem arthropods and distant relatives of modern crabs, insects and spiders.
‘Our new study describes Pahvantia hastasta, a long-extinct relative of modern arthropods, which fed on microscopic organisms near the ocean’s surface’ says Stephen Pates. ’We discovered that it used a fine mesh to capture much smaller plankton than any other known swimming animal of comparable size from the Cambrian period. This shows that large free-swimming animals helped to kick-start the diversification of life on the sea floor over half a billion years ago.
• 542,000,000 B.C. - • 488,300,000 B.C. - The Cambrian Era
The Cambrian Explosion
“Refers to the geologically sudden appearance of many new animal body plans about 530 million years ago. At this time, at least nineteen, and perhaps as many as thirty-five phyla of forty total, made their first appearance on earth within a narrow five- to ten-million-year window of geologic time. The Cambrian explosion thus marked a major episode of morphogenesis in which many new and disparate organismal forms arose in a geologically brief period of time.” - Stephen C. Meyer
It’s called “creation”.
Everything they find offers clues. So, I guess, that presumes those becoming clued in were at first clueless.
Thanks Simon Green.
Life did not just happen.
It was designed and spoken into existence.
Here's a great work that describes the first chordate found in the Burgess Shale. It describes the decades of study by three very dedicates scientists on the Burgess Shale fossils
Apparently CO2 and warm temperatures aren't so devastating after all.
Only if you are a Rat and trying to soak the gullible public for votes, power & tax dollars!
Is it just me or hasn’t it been known for a while about radiodonts in the primeval ocean?
Re: “CO2 was 7,000 ppm”
I wish your excellent graph showed CO2 levels further back in time.
It’s my understanding that “Snowball Earth” peaked about 650 million years ago.
Do we have any CO2 data from that earlier, frigid point in Earth’s history?
I don’t know. That’s the oldest data I have found.
I find it incredible how people come up with these dates, as if they are fact. They are guesses....theories.
Nothing implicit about that.
We may have discovered how to release the energy in an unstable atom, but we can’t put it back together the way it was. We can partially decode DNA, but we didn’t write it; it was written, to be sure, since even people like Bill Gates acknowledge it to be a computer program. The laws of thermodynamics have an author.
Not only radio-dos, but radiodonts.
Explosions tend to kill life.
If it were a snake it would bite them. God suddenly, very, very suddenly, created all things.
“clues to how life exploded on sea floor”
I thought it was depth charges and dynamite that made life explode on the sea floor.
“...and distant relatives of modern crabs, insects and spiders.”
Oops! There goes my seafood eating days!
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