9 ms·
Massive animal species discovered in half-billion-year-old Burgess Shale
- davidw 5y ago> "The sheer size of this animal is absolutely mind-boggling, this is one of the biggest animals from the Cambrian period ever found" ... > With an estimated total length of half a meter I suppose for specialists who understand what was floating around back then it's impressive, but that seemed a bit underwhelming to me.
- nighthawk454 5y agoIt's all relative I suppose, no? They were fairly clear on the scale right in the section you quoted, right at the top: > With an estimated total length of half a meter, Titanokorys was a giant compared to most animals that lived in the seas at that time, most of which barely reached the size of a pinky finger.
- NelsonMinar 5y agoyou left out the part of the quote that gives it context. "compared to most animals that lived in the seas at that time, most of which barely reached the size of a pinky finger."
- davidw 5y agoYes, but with the headline and the guy talking 'massive'... they could have included a 'relative to' or something? I was expecting some kind of deep sea leviathan.
- isk517 5y ago'Dog-sized animal species discovered...' gets a lot less clicks.
- Fricken 5y agoThe relation was made in the headline. It stands to reason that a massive half billion year old animal would be massive relative to other animals from a half billion years ago.
- Dylan16807 5y agoDoes the average person have a good sense of how big animals were 500 million years ago vs. 250-300 million years ago? The latter of which was quite big, and any 'massive' from there on would be fitting by modern standards.
- stan_rogers 5y agoThe average interested person would have, yes. That would include anybody who's watched any of the relevant PBS Nova programming, or any of David Attenborough's work, etc. - you don't need to have kept your head in the journals to be informed at that level.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y agoYes, it's a click bait title. Yes, it's still fascinating and mind boggling if you know a little of the background.
- davidw 5y agoI didn't say it wasn't interesting. But it would have probably been even more interesting without building it up as 'massive creature' that's actually the size of my cat.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- exporectomy 5y agoIf, instead of calling it half a meter, they had called it "10 times the length of other animals of its time", maybe you would still be impressed.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- xqcgrek2 5y agoIf I had a time machine, the Cambrian and the period immediately preceding it would be the first place I'd go. It's so incredibly interesting that whatever happened caused the first proper multicellular life to arise after 3-3.5 billion years of just single celled life.
- cvg 5y agoMaybe you did and brought multicellular life back with you.
- nkrisc 5y agoWill do that. They haven't yet, presumably. At least from our perspective, anyway.
- stavros 5y agoThey will and did. That's how life started, millions of years ago.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> Will do that. They haven't yet, presumably. At least from our perspective, anyway. Well, from the perspective of their subjective experience. From our perspective, if we are already seeing the effects...
- dotancohen 5y agoI think that Picard actually witnessed the event.
- TecoAndJix 5y agoST:TNG (Series Finale) S7E26/27 https://youtu.be/YLyqTtrhUJE https://youtu.be/YLyqTtrhUJE
- dotancohen 5y ago
- tantalor 5y agoHow is there not a silhouette of a person standing next to this thing? Paleontology reporters, you have one job.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- SketchySeaBeast 5y agoIt's hard to sell "massive animal species" when you put a person silhouette and realize it was the size of a corgi.
- LanceH 5y agoThen people think that dinosaurs and humans coexisted. They just can't win.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- andrewstuart 5y agoFrom some of the underwhelmed comments here, perhaps the significance of the Burgess Shale is not widely understood. This book is an amazing read and will explain it, if you're interested: https://www.bookdepository.com/Wonderful-Life-Stephen-Jay-Gould/9780393307009 https://www.bookdepository.com/Wonderful-Life-Stephen-Jay-Go... The Burgess Shale contains fossils from some of the earliest complex multi cellular life. Prior to this, for billions of years life was single cell or collections of single cell organisms. This is the time when complex life first appeared on earth, and the animals that evolved then were startlingly weird. And yes, most of them were very small. What seems to have happened, is that "one day" (in geological terms) there was nothing but single cell organisms, and essentially "next day" (again, in geological time frames) there was an absolute explosion of complex life/animals. Most interesting about life at this time is not just the diversity of life, but the diversity of fundamental types of animals. For some reason at this time evolution was free to come up with entirely new types of "animal designs", not just modifications of previously existing body types. Today, all animals on earth are classified into a very small number of basic types of animal - (perhaps only 5?). but many of the fossils found in the Burgess Shale are so strange that it's not clear that they belong to any known family of animals. This implies that back then there might have been many, many fundamental types of animal, today we are left with only a handful of basics types. There's even the suggestion that there are creatures that can't really be classified into plant or animal - it's not clear what they are at all. Forgive me if I get the above wrong - I'm no expert, just an enthusiast. Maybe others can provide more information about the basic types of animal and how this relates to the Burgess Shale. The Burgess Shale is a window into the absolutely most interesting time of earths history. An animal the size of a dog might have been the largest animal on earth.
- ComputerGuru 5y agoJust to add: if anyone is interested in learning more about the sudden appearance of extremely varied life, this event is called the “Cambrian explosion” and makes for some very interesting reading.
- thangalin 5y agoCambrian Explosion is a bit of a misnomer because it leads people to think it was unique with respect to evolutionary processes. There is a push to call it the Cambrian Radiation [0]. Throughout complex life's time on Earth there have been multiple periods of rapid evolutionary development similar to the Cambrian. A blurb about the Cambrian Radiation appears in my coffee table picture book [1]. [0]: https://impacts.to/bibliography.pdf#page=41 https://impacts.to/bibliography.pdf#page=41 [1]: https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf#page=15 https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf#page=15
- nsajko 5y agoThere are more reconstructions and some photos in the linked paper, e.g.: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/cms/asset/1a42ffff-eeca-48be-a0f4-9159279e6c3b/rsos210664f05.jpg https://royalsocietypublishing.org/cms/asset/1a42ffff-eeca-4... Meeting one of these would be quite uncanny, as it's very different from the animals that live today.
- Sebb767 5y agoA 3d animation would be highly interesting, though we could probably really only guess at how this thing actually moved.
- masklinn 5y agoEh it’s not that bad, it has plenty of weird structures but from afar it has a feeling of giant bugs. It’s huge (for the time) but reconstructions of its various cousins (the other radiodonts) look way, way weirder.
- JoeAltmaier 5y agoIt makes sense to me that body shapes were all over the map in the Cambrian. Life had just begun to fit into ecological niches. It was the wild west! A life form only had to have some small advantage to explode onto the scene. Even more so when the niche was empty, so competition was slight. Niches themselves gyrated wildly as life forms evolved, each being an opportunity for some other life form to capitalize on. Rock, paper, scissors, Spock and on and on! It took a long time to settle, and for life to start 2nd and 3rd-order optimizations to their niche. It became harder to 'move about' in the evolutionary landscape, when spaces started filling up. Certain body types became 'popular' and took over from some of the stranger ones. It became important not to have too many 'sports' e.g. body details that were expensive and not too useful. I imagine the Cambrian as a sort of 'initial condition' game of chance for life on Earth. Change things a little back then, and we might have tentacles or pincer mouths!
- plushpuffin 5y agoIt was like the early days of WoW, when nobody knew what they were doing, not even the developers!
- brailsafe 5y agoI like this somewhat bizarre but apt comparison.
- ekianjo 5y ago> "The sheer size of this animal is absolutely mind-boggling" > "half a meter" Even scientists are doing clickbait titles these days
- yumraj 5y agoContext matters and size is relative.
- Hayarotle 5y agoIt is "mind-boggling" compared to the size of similar animals at the time. Half a meter might sound short, but I'd say it would be mind-boggling to find a half-meter long ant, spider or bee in a forest, for example. Not so big compared to all animals that ever existed, but massive compared to similar animals at the time.
- IncRnd 5y agoNo, it was not mind-boggling. Read the first two sentences of the very next paragraph. "Evolutionarily speaking, Titanokorys belongs to a group of primitive arthropods called radiodonts. The most iconic representative of this group is the streamlined predator Anomalocaris, which may itself have approached a metre in length." If the most iconic representative of a group is twice the size of this new discovery, the size of the new discovery is not "mind boggling" or "massive".
- masklinn 5y agoAnd one of the previous members of the order, Aegirocassis, is estimated to have reached two meters.
- dotancohen 5y agoArguably the two most iconic dinosaurs, T. Rex and the Brontosaurus family, are far larger and more aggressive than the rest of the group. Iconic does not imply representative. Though I do agree that this creature wouldn't seem mind-boggling to those only familiar with the period's "iconic" species, in fact this creature would be mind-boggling to the vast majority of creatures alive at the time.
- sandworm101 5y ago>> was a giant compared to most animals that lived in the seas at that time, most of which barely reached the size of a pinky finger. A statement that is equally true today. We live in a time of giants (modern whales are the largest creatures ever) but the vast majority of creatures in the ocean remain very small.
- Evidlo 5y agoHere is a picture of the fossil: https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/210907153715-03-titanokorys-gainesi-fossil-exlarge-169.jpg https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/210907153715-03-titan...
- unwind 5y agoNot being familiar with Canadian museum names' abbreviations, the phrasing "ROM palaeontologists" from the subtitle sent my mind trying to remember which science-fiction series this reminded me of ... but it failed. Also, and on-topic, it's amazing how they can go from the actual fossil to so much understanding/theory about an ancient animal's shape and features.
- sramsay 5y agoI would suggest getting through your first cup of coffee before you hit this article. It speaks of "ROM-based Ph.D. students" and "giant swimming heads."
- pvaldes 5y agoA interesting footnote is the presence of possible chordate animals yet in that fauna (we are chordates as any other vertebrate). They were probably preyed upon by this creatures and at 5 cm long would seen this animal as huge an terrifying, for sure.