From ScienceDaily:
Researchers have described a new species of brittle star, which are closely related to starfish, and showed how these sea creatures evolved in response to the rise of shell-crushing predators during the late Palaeozoic Era. The results, reported in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, also suggest that brittle stars evolved new traits before the largest mass extinction event in Earth’s history, and not after, as was the case with many other forms of life.
A fossilised ‘meadow’ of dancing brittle stars — frozen in time in the very spot that they lived — was found in Western Australia and dates from 275 million years ago. It contains several remarkably preserved ‘archaic’ brittle stars, a newly-described genus and species called Teleosaster creasyi. They are the last known complete brittle stars of their kind, an evolutionary hangover pushed to the margins of the world’s oceans by the threat from predators.
The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, suggest that while other species of brittle stars evolved in response to predators such as early forms of rays and crabs, these archaic forms simply moved to where the predators weren’t — namely the seas around Australia, which during the Palaeozoic era was pushed up against Antarctica. In these cold, predator-free waters, the archaic forms were able to grow much larger, and lived at the same time as the modern forms of brittle star, which still exist today.Paper. (paywall) – Aaron W. Hunter and Kenneth J. McNamara. Prolonged co-existence of “Archaic” and “Modern” Palaeozoic ophiuroids – evidence from the early Permian, Southern Carnarvon Basin, Western Australia. Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, 2017 More.
Interesting:
“Brittle stars appear to have bucked this trend, however,” said co-author Dr Aaron Hunter, a visiting postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Earth Sciences. “They seem to have evolved before the Great Dying, into a form which we still see today.”
This is a story we may start to hear more often.
See also: Stasis: When life goes on but evolution does not happen