Scientists Wrong - This Ancient Animal Never Existed

Back in 1896, in the southwestern United States, scientistsfound a strange fossil 500 million years old. It looked like a cake with tentacles outstretched to the sides: its appearance was compared to a starfish, a cupcake with a hole in the bottom, and even the spokes of bicycle wheels. After the discovery, the scientists decided that they had discovered a new species of an ancient animal - they identified it as a jellyfish with tentacles and gave the name Brooksella alternata. Over the years, researchers have regularly changed their mind about what class of animals these remains belong to. Recently, thanks to modern technology, it was possible to find out that the found fossil is not an animal, but just a mineral of an unusual shape.

Contrary to previous beliefs of scientists, the ancient animal Brooksella alternata clearly did not exist.

Mysterious ancient animal

For decades, scholars have advancedsuggestions that Brooksella alternata is a jellyfish, a prehistoric worm, an algae, or a glass sponge. Some scientists even believed that this fossil is a solidified gas bubbles. The latter were partly right - a fresh look at Brooksella alternata using X-ray, chemical analysis and micro-MRI indicated that the fossils are of non-biological origin.

According to the authors of a new scientific work,fossils, apart from the presence of "tentacles", there is nothing that would allow them to be attributed to glass sponges. What they took to be the "mouth" of the ancient creature is located below - an animal like a sponge could not effectively filter water with such an orientation of the mouth.

Brooksella alternata really looks like a jellyfish with tentacles

A downward-facing mouth is found in starfish, butthe fossil again cannot belong to the ancestor of these creatures. The fact is that the most ancient starfish appeared on Earth about 480 million years ago. But the found fossil has a much more respectable age - 500 million years!

Calling Brooksella alternata a worm is also impossible.Such creatures did live in the Cambrian period, but paleontologists have no evidence that they could form such tentacles.

In 2022, we told what the most ancient animals in the world ate. Read the details in this article.

Ancient fossil turned out not to be alive

Recently, scientists have studied the chemical composition andstructure of the fossil, which led to the unexpected conclusion that this is not an animal fossil, but simply an unusual form of silica. Scientists are well aware that this mineral particle is capable of forming a spherical, cubic or hexagonal shape. To verify this, they compared "Brooksella alternata" to other forms of silica that had previously been found in Cambrian rocks around the world. They did not find any differences between them, except for the presence of the presence of formations stretched to the sides in the controversial sample.

Many fossils similar to Brooksella alternata have been found in the US

Scientists have noted that Mars is rich in silicarocks can still form shapes that look like flower petals. Something similar can also appear on Earth - for example, if lightning strikes sand, a branching crystallized form called fulgurite sometimes forms. I talked about them in detail in an article about rare crystals that form after lightning strikes.

Fulgurite formed after a lightning strike

According to scientists, if earlier their colleaguestried to study the way of life of Brooksella alternata, they would immediately understand that this is not a living creature. The reason, again, is that his “mouth” was on the bottom. By the way, scientists still do not know how such a depression formed on the bottom of the silica.

The Unsolved Mystery of the Ancient World

So the scientists found that Brooksella alternatais not an ancient animal. But they did not reveal all the secrets of this fossil. For example, in the southwestern United States, they managed to find a lot of silica in such an unusual shape, and no one knows what caused them to form. With all this, the results of micro-MRI indicate that inside all these finds have a completely different structure. Therefore, scientists intend to continue studying the fossils in order to learn as many details about them as possible.

These fossils are the same on the outside, but have different internal structures. Source: James St. John

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According to scientists, the most ancient animal in the worldis the tadpole shrimp Triops cancriformis. Based on the fossilized remains, these creatures lived from the Triassic period, which lasted from 251.9 to 201.3 million years ago. They lived in the water and had a body in the form of a small spatula - thanks to this shape, they dug holes at the bottom and lived inside them. My colleague Andrei Zhukov recently spoke about this and another ancient creation in this article. I strongly recommend reading!