What may be one of Earth’s earliest animals has a punk rock vibe

Being a punk rocker means being perpetually misunderstood. So perhaps it’s vindication that that some seafloor fossils, once considered just piles of decomposing gunk, may now be reclassified as animals — and fittingly named after punk rocker John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, of the Sex Pistols.

The newly named Lydonia jiggamintia was once thought to be a pseudofossil called Blackbrookia. But it might instead be a rare Precambrian animal, which would make L. jiggamintia one of the earliest animals in the fossil record, researchers report September 16 in Palaeontologia Electronica.

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