{"id":27717,"date":"2025-05-13T23:01:07","date_gmt":"2025-05-13T23:01:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=27717"},"modified":"2025-05-13T23:29:23","modified_gmt":"2025-05-13T23:29:23","slug":"this-fossilized-creature-has-3-eyes-but-everything-else-looks-familiar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=27717","title":{"rendered":"This Fossilized Creature Has 3 Eyes, but Everything Else Looks Familiar"},"content":{"rendered":"
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More than 500 million years before Matt Groening and \u201cThe Simpsons\u201d introduced us to Blinky,<\/a> a mutated fish with an extra eye swimming through Springfield\u2019s Old Fishin\u2019 Hole, a three-eyed predator chased prey through seas of the Cambrian Period. Once it caught its quarry, a pair of spine-covered grasping claws and a circular mouth covered in teeth would finish the job.<\/p>\n

Known as Mosura fentoni, this creature is a worthy addition to the bizarre bestiary<\/a> preserved in the Burgess Shale, a substantial fossil deposit in the Canadian Rockies. However, the animal\u2019s anatomy, described Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science<\/a>, reveals that Mosura may not be as alien as it looks.<\/p>\n

The first Mosura specimen was unearthed more than a century ago by the paleontologist Charles Walcott, who discovered the Burgess Shale in 1909. Over recent decades, paleontologists at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto have uncovered dozens of additional Mosura fossils, which they nicknamed \u201csea moths\u201d because of flaps on the critters that help them swim and that look similar to wings.<\/p>\n

They were not fish, but it was clear that sea moths were related to radiodonts, a group of ancestral arthropods that dominated Cambrian food chains. But a closer inspection of the animal would not happen until a trove of Mosura specimens were unearthed in 2012 in Marble Canyon, a Burgess Shale outcrop.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cHaving this collection of both old and new specimens kicked us into gear to finally figure this animal out,\u201d said Joseph Moysiuk, a paleontologist who studied the Marble Canyon fossils as a doctoral student.<\/p>\n

Dr. Moysiuk teamed up with his adviser at the Royal Ontario Museum, Jean-Bernard Caron, to examine some 60 sea moth specimens. Like other Burgess Shale creatures, many Mosura specimens were well preserved, retaining features like digestive tracts and circulatory systems. Some even possessed traces of nerve bundles in each of the creature\u2019s three eyes.<\/p>\n

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More than 500 million years before Matt Groening and \u201cThe Simpsons\u201d introduced us to Blinky, a mutated fish with an extra eye swimming through Springfield\u2019s Old Fishin\u2019 Hole, a three-eyed predator chased prey through seas of the Cambrian Period. Once it caught its quarry, a pair of spine-covered grasping claws and a circular mouth covered in teeth would finish the job.Known as Mosura fentoni, this creature is a worthy addition to the bizarre bestiary preserved in the Burgess Shale, a substantial fossil deposit in the Canadian Rockies. However, the animal\u2019s anatomy, described Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science, reveals that Mosura may not be as alien as it looks.The first Mosura specimen was unearthed more than a century ago by the paleontologist Charles Walcott, who discovered the Burgess Shale in 1909. Over recent decades, paleontologists at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto have uncovered dozens of additional Mosura fossils, which they nicknamed \u201csea moths\u201d because of flaps on the critters that help them swim and that look similar to wings.They were not fish, but it was clear that sea moths were related to radiodonts, a group of ancestral arthropods that dominated Cambrian food chains. But a closer inspection of the animal would not happen until a trove of Mosura specimens were unearthed in 2012 in Marble Canyon, a Burgess Shale outcrop.\u201cHaving this collection of both old and new specimens kicked us into gear to finally figure this animal out,\u201d said Joseph Moysiuk, a paleontologist who studied the Marble Canyon fossils as a doctoral student.Dr. Moysiuk teamed up with his adviser at the Royal Ontario Museum, Jean-Bernard Caron, to examine some 60 sea moth specimens. Like other Burgess Shale creatures, many Mosura specimens were well preserved, retaining features like digestive tracts and circulatory systems. Some even possessed traces of nerve bundles in each of the creature\u2019s three eyes.We 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":27719,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27717","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\/27717","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=27717"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27717\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27720,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27717\/revisions\/27720"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/27719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}