A hundred years on, Sir David Attenborough’s body may have turned to dust, but a fossilized sea creature believed to represent Earth’s earliest animal predator will continue to bear his name.
Discovered in Charnwood Forest, Leicestershire, where Attenborough hunted for fossils as a child, the creature predates what was previously thought to be the oldest carnivore by 20 million years.
Paleontologists have named it Auroralumina attenboroughii in honor of the TV presenter. The first part of its name is Latin for dawn lantern, in recognition of its great age and resemblance to a burning torch, and the creature is thought to have used a set of densely packed tentacles to catch food in Earth’s early oceans.
Charnwood Forest is famous for its fossils. Although Attenborough mined there as a child, he avoided the rocks where Auroralumina was discovered. “They were thought to be so ancient that they date back long before life on the planet began.” So I never looked for fossils there,” he said.
A few years later, in 1957, a fern-like print was discovered by Roger Mason, a junior at Attenborough’s school. The discovery turned out to be one of the oldest fossilized animals and was named Charnia masoni in Mason’s honor.
“Now – almost – I’ve caught up and I’m really delighted,” said Attenborough, who has more than 40 species named after him, ranging from the Madagascar dragonfly to the dandelion-like hawkweed, which is only found in the Brecon Beacons in south Wales .
Auroralumina is part of a find of more than 1,000 fossils discovered in 2007 when a team of researchers from the British Geological Survey spent more than a week in Charnwood Forest cleaning a 100 square meter rock face with toothbrushes and high-pressure jets, before using a rubber mold to capture an impression of its lumps and bumps.
The fossil was dated at the British Geological Survey headquarters using tiny radioactive minerals in the surrounding rock called zircons, which act as geological clocks.
Related to the group that includes modern corals, jellyfish and anemones, the 560m specimen is the first of its kind. His discovery, reported in Nature Ecology and Evolution, calls into question when modern animal groups appeared on Earth.
“It is generally accepted that modern animal groups such as jellyfish appeared 540 million years ago in the Cambrian explosion. But this predator predates that by 20 million years,” said Dr Phil Wilby, head of palaeontology at the British Geological Survey, who helped discover it.
“This is the earliest creature we know of that has a skeleton. We’ve only found one so far, but it’s extremely exciting to know that there must be others that hold the key to the beginnings of complex life on Earth.
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Dr Frankie Dunn, of Oxford University’s Natural History Museum, who carried out the detailed study, said: “It’s unlike anything else we’ve found in the fossil record from that time.”
While the body plans of other fossils from this period bear no relation to those of living animals, “this one clearly has a skeleton with tightly packed tentacles that would have flailed in the water, catching passing food, much like corals and sea anemones do today,” she said. .
It probably came from shallower water than the other fossils found at Charnwood. “All of the fossils on the scrubbed rock surface were anchored to the sea floor and were swept in the same direction by a flood of volcanic ash sweeping the submerged foot of the volcano, except for one, A. attenboroughii,” Dunn said. “It’s lying at an odd angle and has lost its footing, so it looks like it was swept down the slope in the flood.”
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