Tag: paleontology
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Entelognathus: The Fish with the First Modern Face
Hundreds of millions of years ago, armoured fish dominated the oceans, lakes and rivers of the world. These now-extinct creatures belonged to a class called Placoderms, meaning ‘plate-skinned’ in Greek. They had armoured plates covering their head and thorax, and they were the first creatures to develop teeth, pelvic fins, and most importantly, jaws. Jaws…
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Ediacara: a “failed” evolutionary experiment?
The Ediacara Hills, north of the city of Adelaide in South Australia are a tumbling mass of ancient rocks. Sunbaked now, 580 million years ago they were a sea alive with soft-bodied organisms. These organisms varied greatly: from millimetres to metres in size; from “blob-like” to intricate in complexity; and from sturdy and resistant to…