Tunicates, these strange animals that have revolutionized life on Earth

2023-08-18 16:23:39

DECRYPTION – A tunicate fossil discovered in Utah sheds light on how the oceans filled with life 500 million years ago.

The teeming oceans as we know them first appeared 541 to 520 million years ago, when a life form that had recently come to Earth but had remained inconspicuous until then, the animals, experienced a spectacular rise. This “evolutionary big bang”, sometimes called the “Cambrian explosion” by scientists (although it was actually a long process that spanned tens of millions of years), laid the of the extraordinary biological diversity that we observe today on our planet.

While some species were already almost a meter tall, most of these animals were quite small, on average a few centimeters. They were mainly soft-bodied animals (without shells or bones), whose preservation in fossil form is extremely difficult. This period is therefore only known from a handful of remarkable fossiliferous sites in the world. A team of paleontologists led by Rudy Lerosey-Aubril and Javier…

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