Editor's Summary
13 July 2006
Mollusc of mats' destruction
Odontogriphus omalus is a star in the firmament of fossil oddities from the Middle Cambrian Burgess Shales of Canada, looking as it does like a cross between an airbed and a coffee grinder. It also had the added allure of 'problematic' status, as the one original fossil could not be pinned down to any known group of animals. Now, based on a study of 189 new specimens, it emerges as a shell-less mollusc that grazed the algal mats of ancient seafloors. The key to this reinterpretation is the identification of an early form of a feeding device characteristic of molluscs, a radula, a hard rasp-like organism used to strip alga from the rocks. This opens a new window on the earliest history of one of the most important animal groups, and will allow a reassessment of several other enigmatic fossils involved in the origin of multicellular animal life before the Cambrian 'explosion'.
News and Views: Palaeontology: A ghost with a bite
Witness a snail scraping microbial films from the inside of an aquarium. Go back 505 million years, and this looks to have been the way an enigmatic early animal made its living (but without the aquarium).
Stefan Bengtson
doi:10.1038/442146a
Article: A soft-bodied mollusc with radula from the Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale
Jean-Bernard Caron, Amélie Scheltema, Christoffer Schander and David Rudkin
doi:10.1038/nature04894
Abstract | Full Text | PDF (595K) | Supplementary information