An ancient, armored worm may be the key to unraveling the evolutionary history of a diverse collection of marine invertebrates.
Discovered in China, a roughly 520-million-year-old fossil of the newly identified worm, dubbed Wufengella, might be the missing link between three of the phyla that constitute a cadre of sea creatures called lophophorates.
Based on a genetic analysis, Wufengella is probably the common ancestor that connects brachiopods, bryozoans and phoronid worms, paleontologist Jakob Vinther and colleagues report September 27 in Current Biology.
“We had been speculating that [the common ancestor] may have been some wormy animal that had plates on its back,” says Vinther, of the University of Bristol
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