Shout out to Nature for publishing a negative result For decades paleontologists interpreted sand-size scraps of mineralized phosphate fossils in Cambrian strata as *vertebrate* tissue These authors went to great lengths to prove these fragments are arthropod cuticle www.nature.com/articles/s41...
I gathered two factoids: 1. "Vertebrates from the Middle Ordovician remain largely enigmatic owing to the paucity of specimens." So the origins have been pushed up to some grey zone. 2. Nature's News page: "Bluesky posts about science garner more likes and reposts than similar ones on X." Ha ha!
❗️Where does it say science posts on BlueSky perform better than similar posts on Vichy Twitter?
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
hey @mcuban.bsky.social any thoughts on this ?
Apparently arthropod cuticle is assumed to be carbonate-based, so the phosphatic chemistry of the fossils led paleontologists to assume they were vertebrate But an extinct phylum of trilobite-like arthropods known as aglaspids had phosphate cuticle These Cambrian fragments are actually aglaspids
Easy for you to say.
This negative result (proving the fragmentary Anatolepis fossils are not vertebrate but are in fact arthropod) now pushes the earliest known vertebrate fossils *up* 40 million years from the Cambrian to the middle Ordovician
These authors produced 3D ultra-high-resolution synchrotron models of four classes of extant arthropods (horseshoe crab, scorpion, Columbus crab, and porcelain crab) to show that the anatomy on the fragmentary Cambrian fossils is consistent with arthropod cuticle
sweet!
The authors had set out to prove the fragments *are* vertebrate in origin, so I appreciate the acknowledgement of being wrong and their contribution to correcting the scientific consensus
Are you saying it took a lot of spine? ...I'll see myself out now.