Illustration: Marianne Collins
What does the image above remind you of? I know! Acorns, right? That's how researchers found the evolutionary missing link of the modern-day acorn worm, a wee invertebrate that live on the seabed.
Because they lack hard bones, soft-bodied marine animals aren't typically well preserved in fossils, but a specimen was found in the early 1900s in the fossil-rich area of Burgess Shale, Canada. While past researchers in the Smithsonian staff missed the connection, evolutionary biologist Jean-Bernard Caron didn't dick around when it comes to realizing that this was the missing evolutionary link:
... [Caron] “stumbled on drawers full of these worms” at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. “I said, ‘Oh my gosh.’ I noticed a lot of these worms in bizarre-shaped rings, like mini Michelin tires in the rock,” said Caron, a co-author of the study.
After Caron and colleagues looked more closely at the fossils, they realized the newfound worm “really connects a lot of dots” in the evolution of hemichordates.
Get loads more info over at this piece by Christine Dell'Amore over at Neational Geographic's Weird & Wild blog: Link
Comments (7)
Also I don't know if there is anything else behind him saying insects because he is not referring to modern day scorpions but an ancestor of them. Maybe they were technically classified as insects. I'm not sure though, google wasn't very helpful on this.