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Nature 442, 146-147 (13 July 2006) | doi:10.1038/442146a; Published online 12 July 2006

Palaeontology: A ghost with a bite

Stefan Bengtson1

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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).

A faint shade on a piece of shale from British Columbia, Canada, has haunted palaeontology for 30 years. This is the fossil of Odontogriphus, the half-a-billion-year-old 'toothed riddle' from the Cambrian Burgess Shale, which has never really found peace within the evolutionary scheme of animals.

  1. Stefan Bengtson is in the Department of Palaeozoology, Swedish Museum of Natural History, Box 50007, SE-104 05 Stockholm, Sweden.
    Email: stefan.bengtson@nrm.se

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