The 560-million-year-old Auroralumina attenboroughii
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
The discovery of Auroralumina qttenboroughii first came to my attention when I was driving home one evening listening to the BBC Inside Science Podcast. Two things about this story caught my attention: 1) it was a really, really old fossil named after Sir David Attenborough who I, alongside much of the British Public, am somewhat of a super fan of, and 2) the paper was written by, and being discussed on the podcast by, Dr Frankie Dunn, from Oxford University, who just so happened to teach me first year paleobiology back in 2022 so it was a voice I recognised well. I always think its so cool when I hear professors that have taught me, and who I have sat in tutorials with and asked stupid questions to, in the news discussing this amazing science they have been doing. I also think its so cool that a lot of my friends, and my boyfriend, are now going on to do PhDs at these big name institutions like Oxford, Cambridge, and Imperial and maybe one day will be discussing their own ground breaking research on podcasts too. Its amazing that I was able to spend four years of my life learning from and amongst these incredibly clever scientist and its wild to me that Dr Dunn, who has just discovered and named this awesome fossil, was four years ago telling me and my friends off for doing the Wordle during a lecture.
Anyway, getting onto the actually story here, Auroralumina attenboroughii is a 560 million year old fossil that was recently (2022) discovered in Charnwood Forest in Leicestershire, a very famous site that is home to many weird, wonderful fossils, and well preserved fossils of this age. 560 million yers ago the Earth was in a period known as the Ediacaran. This was a very long time ago indeed, and was before an event known as the Cambrian explosion (about 540 million years ago), in which the ancestors of all modern organisms came about alongside cool steps in evolution such as eyes, bilateral symmetry, and hard skeletons. A. attenboroughii is thought to have been one of the first animals to ever show predatory behaviour, that is hunting other animals to eat them. It probably ate things like zooplankton, algae and protists. This discovery pushes the age of predation (when scientists think this behaviour of things eating other things first evolved) back by almost 20 million years!
The name Auroralumina attenboroughii translates to mean Attenborough's dawn light and is obviously named after Sir David Attenborough, in honour of the work he has done in advocating for the protection of Charnwood forest. Attenborough actually has over 50 species and genera of plants and animals named after him which I think is pretty awesome! The reason he, and so many others, are advocating for the protection of Charnwood forest is because of how important a site it is in geological and paleobiological history. Fossils from as far back in time as the Ediacaran period are rare, even more rare than other periods because the animals and plants around at this time had not yet evolved mineralised skeletons, meaning that they were just made of soft tissue which breaks down really easily and is not often fossilised, making fossils of these organisms super hard to find. Charnwood forest is a site known as a konservat lagerstatten (German for concentrated deposit) which basically means it had the right environmental conditions to have host extra well preserved fossils in the rocks (in this case due to a low oxygen environment)- this is why we can see so many soft bodied fossils from the Ediacaran in the area (give "Ediacaran fossils" and google and you'll find some wonderful animals!).
A. attenboroughii however is not actually a strict fossil, in terms of it is not the actual remains of the organism. It is instead an imprint of the animal that was left in fine mud - what geologists call a mold. It also looks a bit different to the other fossils found in the area which is why its discovery is so exciting. Its skeleton is densely packed with tentacles that probably moved around in the water to capture its food kind of like corals and sea anemones do today. In fact, it is thought to be a stem medusozoa, in other words to be a very early ancestor of cnidarians such as today's corals and jelly fish. It most likely lived in shallow waters and was anchored to the floor, just waving its tentacles abut to catch its prey. This is similar to what juvenile jellyfish do today when they are in what is called their sessile stage of life before they break off and float around like you would picture a jellyfish to do. Its a very cool discovery because it demonstrates that the body plan of this group of animals (cnidarians) was established before the Cambrian explosion, really really far back in terms of the history of life!
If you want to read more, its discovery and body plan is outlined in this paper in Nature Ecology & Evolution: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-022-01807-x (there are also some good pics in here).
Sources:
Nature Paper
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