Researchers found the fossil of a newly-hatched ancient lamprey, left, that has large eyes and a sucker mouth with sharp teeth, like the modern sea lamprey, right. (Tetsuto Miyashita/Canadian Museum of Nature; Taylor Simmons/CBC)
CBC Technology & Science has a story about fossil lampreys. New baby lamprey fossils found in South Africa have shed some light on the early evolution of vertebrates. The fossils date to the Devonian Period about 360 million years ago. Incredibly, there were hatchlings included with some of the specimens of the Priscomyzon. Babies are very rarely preserved in the fossil record. All the detail are in a paper published in the journal Nature.
Lampreys are boneless, blood-sucking snake-like fish considered to be "living fossils" that have barely changed since they first arose during the Paleozoic era, more than 100 million years before the first dinosaurs.
Interestingly, since the 1800s, scientists have thought that the earliest ancestors of all vertebrates, including ourselves, resembled lampreys' worm-like babies.
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That's because lampreys don't fossilize well, as they have no bones, only cartilage. They only form compressed fossils under very specific conditions, similar to those that preserved soft-bodied ancient creatures in Canada's Burgess Shale, said Philippe Janvier, emeritus director of research at the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientific (CNRS) in an email.
"Such fossils have long been regarded as barely more informative than a squashed slug on a highway," said Janvier, who co-authored the 2018 paper with Docker. It was hard to tell whether any of them were ammocoetes or juveniles in the middle of metamorphosing into adults.
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Back in the Paleozoic, South Africa was located at the South Pole, but it was much warmer and wasn't always iced over. At that time, Waterloo Farm was a coastal lagoon teeming with fish and invertebrates, which made up most of the animals on Earth at that time, when the ancestors of modern amphibians were just starting to take their first steps out of the water and onto land.
Miyashita got in touch with the local expert there, Robert Gess, a paleontologist and research associate at the Albany Museum and Rhodes University in Makhanda, South Africa. Gess had rescued 100 tonnes of shale that contained thousands of fossil specimens at Waterloo Farm before the construction of a local road.
