University of Leicester
A view of Pauline avibella, a shrmplike marine creature, from a computer-generated model.
A tiny, fossilized crustacean that lived 425 million years ago has been discovered, remarkably intact, in a rock formation in Herefordshire, England. Paleontologists say it represents a new genus and species, belonging to a class of shrimplike marine creatures called ostracods.
Despite their age, the two specimens were well preserved. They included the shell and the soft parts of the animal, including its body, limbs, eyes, gills and alimentary system.
“It gives us a really special insight into the biology of these animals,” said David Siveter of the University of Leicester in England. He and colleagues from the University of Oxford, Imperial College and Yale discuss the findings in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
The researchers determined that the animal had large eyes and seven pairs of limbs, with the front two pairs adapted for swimming.
It probably used these limbs to swim near the water’s bottom rather than in the water column, Dr. Siveter said.
Analyzing the fragile fossil posed a challenge. “We couldn’t grab it from the rock because it’s so delicate and small,” Dr. Siveter said. “And we couldn’t X-ray it because there wasn’t enough density contrast between the rock and the fossil.”
So the researchers used physical tomography, grinding minute slices off the fossils and capturing an image of each new section. The process, permitted by international guidelines for establishing new species, destroys the fossils themselves but yields detailed data to produce a computer-generated model.
The crustacean is named Pauline avibella, after Dr. Siveter’s deceased wife, Pauline.
Observatory: Fossils of New Species Discovered in England
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