Oldest Live Birth Captured in Fish Fossil

By Miss Cellania in Animals & Pets, Science & Tech on May 29, 2008 at 3:48 pm

A fossil fish, estimated at 380 million years old, has been discovered in the act of giving birth. The fish and her offspring died while still connected by an umbilical cord.

Dubbed “mother fish” by the scientists who discovered her in northwestern Australia, Materpiscis attenboroughi is not only an entirely new genus and species, but pushes back the first known case of live birth in the animal kingdom by some 200 million years.

The discovery is also the earliest evidence so far of internal fertilization, or sex with penetration. Other fish species from the Middle Palaeozoic Era laid eggs. Link -via J-Walk Blog

(image credit: Museum Victoria)

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Archbob
May 29th, 2008 at 6:10 pm
How does a fish die and become fossilized in the act of giving birth?
fact checkin'
May 29th, 2008 at 6:49 pm
How does a fish die and become fossilized in the act of giving birth?

[from page 2 of the article] “The fish and its unborn offspring probably fell victim to rapid depletion of oxygen in the water, settling to the bottom of the sea where they were gently covered in layers of silt-like mud that hardened over time, according to the scientists.”
sam
May 30th, 2008 at 1:48 am
Maybe it’s our great grandpa.
Emily M
May 30th, 2008 at 4:44 am
Birth is fun to say in a creepy voice
Thomas
May 30th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Mmm… paleolithic internal fertilization gets me all worked up.
Idil
May 30th, 2008 at 10:45 pm
attenboroughi?
hah.

And how would oxygen be depleted THAT quickly… almost a split second? It would be gradual… surely the fish wouldn’t still be attached to its mother…
Miss Cellania
May 30th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
That’s what I thought… there’s lots of reasons for a fish to die. There could have been some illness or trauma that caused the umbilical cord to not detach, which also caused death, or something could have gone wrong with the birth process. Maybe she was old. Who knows?
Jimbo
May 31st, 2008 at 8:26 am
Some fish give live birth today. Guppies, Swordtails, Molly, and Platties.

Since they only guess at the age, we can only laugh at their guess.

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