‘ Tulip animal’ discovered in B. C.
Scientists studying the rich fossil fields of the Burgess Shales in B. C. have discovered remains of a previously unknown type of life — a tulip- like animal that fed through a filter.
CALGARY — It was the early 1980s when researchers poring through B. C.’ s Burgess Shale found slabs of stone that looked like pressed tulips preserved as if they had been stored between the pages of a giant book.
The fossil field in Yoho National Park was hiding what may be a whole new species with no known living counterpart. Scientists suspect they may have found some lost branch of the tree of life.
Officially, the 1,000 or so specimens chipped from the Rockies have been dubbed Siphusactum gregarium. Unofficially, researchers have called them the tulip animals.
They’re less than 20 centimetres long and believed to have been early filter feeders that pumped water into a sack to sift edible plant and animal material. Although hundreds were gathered at the same spot, they didn’t colonize, nor did they cling together. Scientists are still unsure how the little tulip- like animals bred.
Under a microscope, all they can trace is a rudimentary gut, a few holes and a long stalk. They were more complicated than a jellyfish, but not by much.
“This one is … unique. We don’t see anything that we could actually place on the tree of life,” said University of Toronto PHD student Lorna O’brien, who has studied the creatures for her thesis since 2008.
In collaboration with the Royal Ontario Museum — which has studied the specimens — the findings were published Wednesday in PLOS One, an online science journal.
“It was very daunting starting with more than 1,000 specimens. The first thing we had to do was filter out which ones were more important and then put the jigsaw pieces together and see if we could reconstruct the animal,” O’brien said.
Fine details about the creature became clear only after submerging the fossils underwater or subjecting them to polarized light under the microscope, she said.
Although the Ontario museum has been collecting fossils from the site since 1983, “it really did take a lot of looking at the specimens before we could figure out what was going on internally in this animal.”
So far, researchers have determined that it sat on the ocean floor like a mushroom. Its sack contained a stomach and six holes that would draw water inside. Still unclear is whether they would then push water out through the same hole or if there were holes near the top, as well.
“We know it wasn’t a rigid structure,” O’brien said, but “it’s probably plantlike only in its shape.”
Jean- Bernard Caron, the curator of invertebrate paleontology at the ROM, said the tulip creatures open a whole new area of study.
“We have a lot of trouble to relate this to any particular group of animals that we know,” Caron said. “That suggests two things: one, we still need more specimens.
“Perhaps there are different species related to this animal to better understand what it is. Maybe other discoveries elsewhere in the world will help us,” he said.
The other possibility remains equally intriguing: “Perhaps this represents a group of organisms that we didn’t know before.”