Friday, November 25, 2022

'Living fossil' undetected for nearly 30,000 years found in California

Story by Cheryl Santa Maria • Yesterday 

In a discovery that can only be described as a 'needle in a haystack,' a clam thought to be extinct for nearly 30,000 years has been found alive in California.

In November 2018, marine researcher Jeff Goddard was searching for slugs at Naples Point when two small, translucent clams caught his eye.

He snapped some high-quality images and shared them with colleagues, who asked him to go back and collect physical samples.

That was easier said than done.

These clams are tiny, with shells measuring only about 10 millimeters. It wasn't until March 2019, after nine unsuccessful trips, that he found another, solitary clam, just as he was about to give up.

A tiny C. cooki clam (bottom center), sitting next to a chiton in the tidepools of Naples Point. (Jeff Goddard)

SEE ALSO: Fossils of car-sized dinosaur-era sea turtle unearthed in Spain

Back in the lab researchers thought they had a new species - until they checked fossil records. They realized it was an ancient crab whose 28,000-year-old fossil described by George Willett in 1937.

Interesting side note: Willet collected upwards of a million fossil specimens from the area but never found that one particular crab, which he named Bornia cooki -- although it has since been re-classified as Cymatioa cooki. Willet named it after Edna Cook, a collector who owned the only two known fossils.

While Goddard's specimen was in the lab, he struck gold again - finding an empty Cooki shell in the sand.

So how did the clam fly under the radar all this time?



 C. cooki clam found at Naples Point.(Jeff Goddard)

Goddard suspects they were carried north between 2014 and 2016, during a marine heatwave event.

That could explain why there was seemingly no trace of them in the area prior to 2018.

“There is such a long history of shell-collecting and malacology in Southern California — including folks interested in the harder-to-find micro-mollusks — that it's hard to believe no one found even the shells of our little cutie,” Goddard said in a statement.

“The Pacific coast of Baja California has broad intertidal boulder fields that stretch literally for miles, and I suspect that down there Cymatioa cooki is probably living in close association with animals burrowing beneath those boulders.”

See Mysterious Alien-like Ocean Creature Going Viral

Story by Michileen Martin • Yesterday 

In James Cameron‘s Oscar-winning 1989 film The Abyss, he depicts the ocean floor as not being all that different from an alien world. If you watch the video below posted Wednesday on Twitter, you’re not going to have a difficult time imagining what Cameron meant. The mysterious ocean creature in the 20 second long video is a Crinoid, also known as a Feather star, even though the animal looks more akin to some kind of marine fern monster.

By Thanksgiving morning, the video had gone viral; attracting close to 90,000 likes and over 7600 retweets. Even with Twitter facing a somewhat chaotic and uncertain future, the captivating crinoid managed to get plenty of attention.

This is far from the first time a recorded video of a feather star has been released, but it’s still relatively rare to get images of the mysterious creature from the ocean. When National Geographic posted a similar video 6 years ago, the publication spoke to paleontology professor Tomasz K. Baumiller who likened the feather stars to “living fossils.” Baumiller said the crinoids “have a tremendous diversity that traces its roots deep down in the geological past.”

These mysterious invertebrates have been in the ocean for about 200 million years according to Baumiller. While they can be found all over the ocean, the professor says there’s a particularly “diverse” concentration of the feather stars in the western part of the Pacific, near Asia. The video the publication featured–with a feather star whose appendages had an almost zebra-like black-and-white striped pattern–was recorded in Thailand.

The mysterious crinoids are born with a stalk which eventually detaches from the ocean floor, allowing all of the feather stars capable of swimming–National Geographic says some are capable only of crawling along the sea bottom–to do so. They can have as few arms as five or as many as 200. The appendages also come in a wide variety of different colors.


A red feather star© Provided by Giant Freakin Robot

The feather stars’ appendages offer some interesting defenses against predators. Just as lizards may shed their tails when another creature latches onto it, the crinoids can detach their appendages. National Geographic also says some of the feather stars are toxic if ingested.

At the same time, other ocean creatures sometimes utilize the mysterious feather stars as kind of an indirect food source. Smaller aquatic creatures, like snails, live on feather stars; attracting fish who will swim through the crinoids’ appendages to munch on the tiny beasts making their homes there.

Feather stars feed on plankton and dead organic matter they capture in their appendages. According to a 2020 Nerdist article, some of the ocean creatures light up in rainbow colors while feeding; which sure beats a dinner bell.


Related video: Eerie creatures of the deep sea
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