Sir David Honored by the Oldest Known Animal Predator
At 96, Sir David Frederick Attenborough is certainly one of the oldest known naturalists on the planet. Now, a team of scientists has named the oldest known animal predator in his honor: a cnidarian they’ve dubbed Auroralumina attenboroughii.
A cross between contemporary jellysh and coral, this critter lived 562 to 556 million years ago during the Ediacaran Period of the Precambrian Epoch. Per the journal Science, it would “appear to be the oldest example of an evolutionary group still living today.”
A team including paleobiologists Frankie Dunn (University of Oxford) and Philip Wilby (British Geological Survey) described the fossil in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. ey named it in honor of Attenborough, who grew up in the area near the Charnwood Forest of the Leicestershire region of central England where the fossil was discovered. It is unique because it seems tied directly to contemporary corals and yet predates the “Cambrian explosion” of modern animals 539 million years ago.