A “518 Million-Year Old” Comb Jelly from China has 18 Tentacles

Image courtesy of Ernst Haeckel, public domain.



Joel Kontinen

In 2008, the National Science Foundation used over 100 computers to analyse the evolutionary history of the Earth’s earliest animals. They suspected that the earliest animal to branch off was the sponge.
But it wasn’t.

Instead, it was a comb jelly.

The comb jelly has tissues and a nervous system, which are complex systems thought to have evolved much later. A sponge, by contrast, is a more “primitive” creature, lacking both tissue and a nervous system.

Now, Jakob Vinther, a paleobiologist at Bristol University in the United Kingdom and Chinese researchers have learned that a "sea monster," which scientists dubbed Daihua sanqiong lived "518 million years" ago in China in time for the Cambrian Explosion that is still a big mystery for evolutionists.

The Cambrian creature had 18 mouth tentacles.

Source:

Geggel, Laura. 2019. 520-Million-Year-Old Sea Monster Had 18 Mouth Tentacles. Live Science (22 March).