My 25 years of palaeoart chronology...

In 2013 I built 23 scale and life-size models for MUSE Science Museum, in Trento, Italy. Here's Kimberella, from the Ediacaran.

#Art #Painting #PaleoArt #PalaeoArt #SciArt #SciComm #DigitalArt #Illustration #Dinosaurs #Birds #Reptiles #Palaeontology #Paleontology #Ediacaran #Kimberella #JurassicWorld

#mollusk evolution hot take:

I'm gonna guess that #Kimberella, the mobile whooping cushion of the #Ediacaran seafloor, was not a mollusk but probably closely ancestral to mollusks. (or at least closely related to something ancestral to mollusk)

It's kind of snail-like and probably had a lick-ey tongue, but it doesn't look like it has the crunchy shell that the original mollusk was projected to have, and I guess the tongue was not quite snail like.

"We show that 558-million-year (Ma)-old tube worm-like #Calyptrina and mollusc-like #Kimberella possessed a gut and shared a #diet of green #algae and bacteria. Despite their ancient age, sterol #metabolism within the gut of both organisms was already comparable to extant invertebrates. 
#Dickinsonia, one of the key #Ediacaran animals, show no traces of dietary molecules, indicating a different feeding mode and possible external #digestion analogous to modern #Placozoa."

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(22)01699-2

Fascinating.

"[S]cientists have confirmed that they have found the world’s oldest meal – in a fossil of an animal that lived 558 million years ago.
[...]
Kimberella appears to have had a digestive system that was capable of selecting the sterols it needed to absorb into its tissue, while discarding the unusable molecules. “[...] That means that Kimberella already has this pretty sophisticated way of feeding.”"

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/ediacaran-meal-fossil/

#Palaeontology #Fossils #Ediacara #Kimberella

World’s oldest meal helps unravel mystery of our earliest animal ancestors https://reporter.anu.edu.au/all-stories/worlds-oldest-meal-helps-unravel-mystery-of-our-earliest-animal-ancestors

Guts, gut contents, and feeding strategies of #Ediacaran animals https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdfExtended/S0960-9822(22)01699-2

By examining the molecular remains of what the #animals ate, the researchers were able to confirm the slug-like organism, known as #Kimberella, had a mouth and a gut and digested food the same way modern animals do. It was likely one of the most advanced creatures of the Ediacarans.

Älteste Mahlzeit der Welt

Fossile Moleküle verraten Darminhalt von 550 Millionen Jahre alten Ediacara-Wesen

https://www.scinexx.de/news/biowissen/aelteste-mahlzeit-der-welt-entdeckt/

#Wissen #Ediacarium #Fossil #Evolution #Mahlzeit #Kimberella