Thursday 9 February 2017

Spiny, armored slug reveals ancestry of molluscs




Date: February 6, 2017
Source: University of Bristol

Scientists from the University of Bristol have uncovered a 480-million-year-old slug-like fossil in Morocco which sheds new light on the evolution of molluscs -- a diverse group of invertebrates that includes clams, snails and squids.

One of the defining characteristics of the molluscs is the possession of a radula, a kind of toothed-tongue which is used to rake up or rasp food.

The radula houses hundreds of teeth, the patterns of which can be used to determine diet and identify species. Whilst not all molluscs have a radula, a radula cannot be found in any other group of animals. Dr Jakob Vinther, from the Schools of Biological Sciences and Earth Sciences, is lead author of the study, which is published today in Nature.

He said: "The molluscs are amongst the earliest animals identifiable in the fossil record, however determining what their ancestor looked like is difficult since many of the groups appear within a small window of time, making the sequence of evolutionary events difficult to piece together."

The recent discovery of a new species of mollusc in the Anti-Atlas region in Morocco has enabled palaeontologists to revisit this problem and infer the appearance of the ancestor of all molluscs.

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