A solitary fossil unearthed in Utah's
Antimony Canyon reveals a long-extinct marine creature previously unknown to
science.
Resembling a dainty tulip bloom or an elegant
white-wine glass, the 500-million-year-old bottom-feeder called Siphusauctum
lloydguntheri looked uniquely ready for a romantic evening of sucking up
microplankton along the seafloor. Sadly for the specimen, the world's only
known example of S. lloydguntheri appears to have died alone, leaving
no descendants past the end of the Cambrian period (541
million to 485.4 million years ago), possibly the victim of mass extinction.
Researchers at the University of Kansas'
Biodiversity Institute described what little is known about the obscure
invertebrate in a new
paper published in the Journal of Paleontology. [Cambrian
Creatures: Photos of Primitive Sea Life]
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