| Bloodsucking-fish fossils overturn once-popular theory about our evolution | |
|
|
|
|
Modern lamprey babies were thought to be linked to ancestor of all vertebrates, but not so, study finds
Lampreys are boneless, blood-sucking snake-like fish considered to be "living fossils" that have barely changed since they first arose during the Paleozoic era, more than 100 million years before the first dinosaurs.
Interestingly, since the 1800s, scientists have thought that the earliest ancestors of all vertebrates, including ourselves, resembled lampreys' worm-like babies. |
|
|
Now, recently discovered baby lamprey fossils have overturned that popular evolutionary theory, which some scientists were already starting to question, reports a Canadian-led study published in the latest issue of the journal Nature.
It turns out that baby lampreys from the Paleozoic era, which had been "missing" from the fossil record until now, don't look the way scientists had previously hypothesized — raising new questions about what our ancestors were really like.
Why scientists thought our ancestors were like baby lampreys
To be sure, adult lampreys seem like an unlikely candidate for what the progenitor of vertebrates might have looked like. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|