They say you should trust your gut, which is what Emmy Smith did when she went hunting for fossils in 2016. Smith, a field geologist, had a hunch she would find something interesting at a site north of Pahrump, Nevada, and she did. But what her gut hadn't told her was that some of those fossils would
They say you should trust your gut, which is what Emmy Smith did when she went hunting for fossils in 2016. Smith, a field geologist, had a hunch she would find something interesting at a site north of Pahrump, Nevada, and she did. But what her gut hadn’t told her was that some of those fossils would turn out to contain the oldest known animal guts on the planet.
The guts are those of an extinct animal called Cloudina, which looked like a worm made of a stack of ice cream cones and lived about 550 million years ago, just after a period in Earth’s history when the entire planet was encased in ice. Schiffbauer and Selly specialize in the group of fossils that Cloudina is a member of: the Ediacara biota. The group includes Earth’s oldest known animals, which means that if a researcher wants to figure out what the dawn of the animal kingdom looked like — and find out when animals developed intestines — studying animal fossils like Cloudina is a good place to start.
“She texted me and said, ‘Hey, found something really cool; you have to come look at this,’” Schiffbauer said. When he got to the lab and saw the X-ray images, he knew exactly what they had on their hands.Story continuesThe tubular guts are only about as wide as a cocktail straw. They run through Cloudina’s entire length, meaning they passed all the way through from the front end to the back end. Not every animal has a digestive system that ends in a different place from where it begins.
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