{"id":19577,"date":"2025-01-08T15:00:05","date_gmt":"2025-01-08T16:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=19577"},"modified":"2025-01-08T16:27:40","modified_gmt":"2025-01-08T16:27:40","slug":"punk-and-emo-fossils-are-a-hot-topic-in-paleontology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=19577","title":{"rendered":"Punk and Emo Fossils Are a Hot Topic in Paleontology"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It\u2019s not causing panic! in the fossil record, but a 430-million-year-old mollusk discovery in Britain is a source of excitement for some scientists.<\/p>\n

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Mark Sutton, an Imperial College London paleontologist, is not a punk.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m more of a folk and country person,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

But when Dr. Sutton pieced together 3-D renderings of a tiny fossil mollusk, he was struck by the spikes that covered its wormlike body. \u201cThis is like a classic punk hairstyle, the way it\u2019s sticking up,\u201d he thought. He called the fossil \u201cPunk.\u201d Then he found a similar fossil with downward-tipped spines reminiscent of long, side-swept \u201cemo\u201d bangs. He nicknamed that specimen after the emotional alt-rock genre.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday, Dr. Sutton and his colleagues published a paper in the journal Nature<\/a> formally naming the creatures as the species Punk ferox and Emo vorticaudum. True to their names, these worm-mollusks are behind something of an upset (if not quite \u201canarchy in the U.K.\u201d) over scientists\u2019 understanding of the origins of one of the biggest groups of animals on Earth.<\/p>\n

In terms of sheer number of species, mollusks are second only to arthropods (the group that contains insects, spiders and crustaceans). The better-known half of the mollusk family tree, conchiferans, contains animals like snails, clams and octopuses. \u201cThe other half is this weird and wacky group of spiny things,\u201d Dr. Sutton said. Some animals in this branch, the aculiferans, resemble armored marine slugs<\/a>, while others are \u201cobscure, weird molluscan worms,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Punk and Emo, the forerunners of today\u2019s worm-mollusks, lived on the dark seafloor amid gardens of sponges, nearly 200 million years before the first dinosaurs emerged on land. Today, their ancient seafloor is a fossil site at the border between England and Wales.<\/p>\n

The site is littered with rounded rocky nodules that \u201clook a bit like potatoes,\u201d Dr. Sutton said. \u201cAnd then you crack them open, and some of them have got these fossils inside. But the thing is, they don\u2019t really look like much at first.\u201d<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s not causing panic! in the fossil record, but a 430-million-year-old mollusk discovery in Britain is a source of excitement for some scientists.Mark Sutton, an Imperial College London paleontologist, is not a punk.\u201cI\u2019m more of a folk and country person,\u201d he said.But when Dr. Sutton pieced together 3-D renderings of a tiny fossil mollusk, he was struck by the spikes that covered its wormlike body. \u201cThis is like a classic punk hairstyle, the way it\u2019s sticking up,\u201d he thought. He called the fossil \u201cPunk.\u201d Then he found a similar fossil with downward-tipped spines reminiscent of long, side-swept \u201cemo\u201d bangs. He nicknamed that specimen after the emotional alt-rock genre.On Wednesday, Dr. Sutton and his colleagues published a paper in the journal Nature formally naming the creatures as the species Punk ferox and Emo vorticaudum. True to their names, these worm-mollusks are behind something of an upset (if not quite \u201canarchy in the U.K.\u201d) over scientists\u2019 understanding of the origins of one of the biggest groups of animals on Earth.In terms of sheer number of species, mollusks are second only to arthropods (the group that contains insects, spiders and crustaceans). The better-known half of the mollusk family tree, conchiferans, contains animals like snails, clams and octopuses. \u201cThe other half is this weird and wacky group of spiny things,\u201d Dr. Sutton said. Some animals in this branch, the aculiferans, resemble armored marine slugs, while others are \u201cobscure, weird molluscan worms,\u201d he said.Punk and Emo, the forerunners of today\u2019s worm-mollusks, lived on the dark seafloor amid gardens of sponges, nearly 200 million years before the first dinosaurs emerged on land. Today, their ancient seafloor is a fossil site at the border between England and Wales.The site is littered with rounded rocky nodules that \u201clook a bit like potatoes,\u201d Dr. Sutton said. \u201cAnd then you crack them open, and some of them have got these fossils inside. But the thing is, they don\u2019t really look like much at first.\u201dWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19579,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19577"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19577\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19580,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19577\/revisions\/19580"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}