[HN Gopher] Massive animal species discovered in half-billion-ye...
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Massive animal species discovered in half-billion-year-old Burgess
Shale
Author : hhs
Score : 64 points
Date : 2021-09-08 19:52 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.rom.on.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.rom.on.ca)
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| It makes sense to me that body shapes were all over the map in
| the Cambrian. Life had just begun to fit into ecological niches.
| It was the wild west! A life form only had to have some small
| advantage to explode onto the scene. Even more so when the niche
| was empty, so competition was slight.
|
| Niches themselves gyrated wildly as life forms evolved, each
| being an opportunity for some other life form to capitalize on.
| Rock, paper, scissors, Spock and on and on!
|
| It took a long time to settle, and for life to start 2nd and 3rd-
| order optimizations to their niche. It became harder to 'move
| about' in the evolutionary landscape, when spaces started filling
| up. Certain body types became 'popular' and took over from some
| of the stranger ones. It became important not to have too many
| 'sports' e.g. body details that were expensive and not too
| useful.
|
| I imagine the Cambrian as a sort of 'initial condition' game of
| chance for life on Earth. Change things a little back then, and
| we might have tentacles or pincer mouths!
| plushpuffin wrote:
| It was like the early days of WoW, when nobody knew what they
| were doing, not even the developers!
| tantalor wrote:
| How is there not a silhouette of a person standing next to this
| thing?
|
| Paleontology reporters, you have _one job_.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| It's hard to sell "massive animal species" when you put a
| person silhouette and realize it was the size of a corgi.
| LanceH wrote:
| Then people think that dinosaurs and humans coexisted. They
| just can't win.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| nsajko wrote:
| There are more reconstructions and some photos in the linked
| paper, e.g.:
| https://royalsocietypublishing.org/cms/asset/1a42ffff-eeca-4...
|
| Meeting one of these would be quite uncanny, as it's very
| different from the animals that live today.
| [deleted]
| davidw wrote:
| > "The sheer size of this animal is absolutely mind-boggling,
| this is one of the biggest animals from the Cambrian period ever
| found"
|
| ...
|
| > With an estimated total length of half a meter
|
| I suppose for specialists who understand what was floating around
| back then it's impressive, but that seemed a bit underwhelming to
| me.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Yes, it's a click bait title.
|
| Yes, it's still fascinating and mind boggling if you know a
| little of the background.
| davidw wrote:
| I didn't say it wasn't interesting. But it would have
| probably been even more interesting without building it up as
| 'massive creature' that's actually the size of my cat.
| nighthawk454 wrote:
| It's all relative I suppose, no? They were fairly clear on the
| scale right in the section you quoted, right at the top:
|
| > With an estimated total length of half a meter, Titanokorys
| was a giant compared to most animals that lived in the seas at
| that time, most of which barely reached the size of a pinky
| finger.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| you left out the part of the quote that gives it context.
| "compared to most animals that lived in the seas at that time,
| most of which barely reached the size of a pinky finger."
| davidw wrote:
| Yes, but with the headline and the guy talking 'massive'...
| they could have included a 'relative to' or something? I was
| expecting some kind of deep sea leviathan.
| Fricken wrote:
| The relation was made in the headline. It stands to reason
| that a massive half billion year old animal would be
| massive relative to other animals from a half billion years
| ago.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Does the average person have a good sense of how big
| animals were 500 million years ago vs. 250-300 million
| years ago? The latter of which was quite big, and any
| 'massive' from there on would be fitting by modern
| standards.
| stan_rogers wrote:
| The average _interested_ person would have, yes. That
| would include anybody who 's watched any of the relevant
| PBS Nova programming, or any of David Attenborough's
| work, etc. - you don't need to have kept your head in the
| journals to be informed at that level.
| isk517 wrote:
| 'Dog-sized animal species discovered...' gets a lot less
| clicks.
| [deleted]
| xqcgrek2 wrote:
| If I had a time machine, the Cambrian and the period immediately
| preceding it would be the first place I'd go.
|
| It's so incredibly interesting that whatever happened caused the
| first proper multicellular life to arise after 3-3.5 billion
| years of just single celled life.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| In fifth grade, I had to write a paper on Evolution vs
| Creationism.
|
| We had to do an oral report. I was terrified.
|
| I picked Creationism.
|
| I used the lack of advanced life in the Cambrian as my evidence
| of a God.
|
| Nice teacher. I forget her name. I think it's Mrs. Gonzolas?
|
| She told me a story about her marriage. She got married the
| previous year. Her, and her husband, went to Mexico on their
| honeymoon. They decided to drive their VW van.
|
| They parked for the night near the ocean. Something they did
| for the past week. She, and her husband, saw three sombreros
| poke their heads over a mountian. They went to sleep. In the
| middle of the night, they took her husband. They didn't take
| their belongings, just her husband.
|
| She never saw him again. She contacted police, and drove
| straight home. She never found out why they took him.
| jerf wrote:
| I call GPT.
| trhway wrote:
| previous stages of any exponential process look very slow from
| the late stages of it. The process of producing and
| complicating the single cell life [from nothing] in these
| 3-3.5B have tremendous complexity on its own.
| user982 wrote:
| You might like this short story:
| http://mrsfacca.weebly.com/uploads/7/6/1/2/7612927/opabinia_...
| cvg wrote:
| Maybe you did and brought multicellular life back with you.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Will do that. They haven't yet, presumably. At least from our
| perspective, anyway.
| stavros wrote:
| They will and did. That's how life started, millions of
| years ago.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| From some of the underwhelmed comments here, perhaps the
| significance of the Burgess Shale is not widely understood.
|
| This book is an amazing read and will explain it, if you're
| interested: https://www.bookdepository.com/Wonderful-Life-
| Stephen-Jay-Go...
|
| The Burgess Shale contains fossils from some of the earliest
| complex multi cellular life. Prior to this, for billions of years
| life was single cell or collections of single cell organisms.
| This is the time when complex life first appeared on earth, and
| the animals that evolved then were startlingly weird. And yes,
| most of them were very small.
|
| What seems to have happened, is that "one day" (in geological
| terms) there was nothing but single cell organisms, and
| essentially "next day" (again, in geological time frames) there
| was an absolute explosion of complex life/animals.
|
| Most interesting about life at this time is not just the
| diversity of life, but the diversity of fundamental types of
| animals. For some reason at this time evolution was free to come
| up with entirely new types of "animal designs", not just
| modifications of previously existing body types.
|
| Today, all animals on earth are classified into a very small
| number of basic types of animal - (perhaps only 5?). but many of
| the fossils found in the Burgess Shale are so strange that it's
| not clear that they belong to _any_ known family of animals. This
| implies that back then there might have been many, many
| fundamental types of animal, today we are left with only a
| handful of basics types.
|
| There's even the suggestion that there are creatures that can't
| really be classified into plant or animal - it's not clear what
| they are at all.
|
| Forgive me if I get the above wrong - I'm no expert, just an
| enthusiast. Maybe others can provide more information about the
| basic types of animal and how this relates to the Burgess Shale.
|
| The Burgess Shale is a window into the absolutely most
| interesting time of earths history.
|
| An animal the size of a dog might have been the largest animal on
| earth.
| davidw wrote:
| I think science is interesting enough in its own right that you
| don't need to oversell it. It is not a 'massive creature', but
| it's fascinating nonetheless when explained in context and
| without the clickbaity headline.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Just to add: if anyone is interested in learning more about the
| sudden appearance of extremely varied life, this event is
| called the "Cambrian explosion" and makes for some very
| interesting reading.
| holler wrote:
| > There's even the suggestion that there are creatures that
| can't really be classified into plant or animal - it's not
| clear what they are at all.
|
| Could you expand on that at all? It sounds really fascinating.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| All life of course at this time is in the ocean.
|
| There's things that look like ferns, and are attached to the
| sea floor. But they lived at such a depth that the sunlight
| would not have been able to reach them so they could not have
| been plants.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charnia
|
| "The living organism grew on the sea floor and is believed to
| have fed on nutrients in the water. Despite Charnia's fern-
| like appearance, it is not a photosynthetic plant or alga
| because the nature of the fossilbeds where specimens have
| been found implies that it originally lived in deep water,
| well below the photic zone where photosynthesis can occur. "
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(page generated 2021-09-08 23:00 UTC)