Discover strange creatures in cocoons 200 million years old

About 200 million years ago, a bizarre, tear-shaped creature with a tightly twisted tail was accidentally locked inside an ancient leech-snout pod. Because of this, this creature is preserved intact until today, when scientists found cocoon fossils in the Antarctic.

According to archaeologists, the cocoon found to look like a modern cocoon, but inside it was a bell-shaped animal like the Vorticella parasite. Its body is about 25 microns long, which is equivalent to the width of human hair. The tail is about 50 microns long and tightly wrapped. And like all other eukaryotes, they possess a large horseshoe figure inside the main body.

Fossil biology 200 million years ago

According to the research team, this bell-shaped creature lived at the end of the Triassic period, when the Earth was much warmer today and tropical stops spread along the mountain. At that time, Antarctica was still part of the supercontinent Gondwana.

Past studies have suggested that the tightly curled tail of an organism is one of the fastest cellular 'engines' ever known by science, when it can be transformed from straight morphology like a telephone cord into a tail. twisted at a speed of about 8cm / sec. To make it easier to imagine, this speed is equivalent to a person running all 3 football fields in just 1 second.

What's more amazing is that this tiny, tiny creature can survive for such a long time. The conservation mechanism of leeches in this case is really strange and rare, archaeologist Benjamin Bomfleur shared on LiveScience.

They parasitic in modern Vorticella

First, a leech produces a mucous cocoon in the water or on a wet leaf near the river. The bell-shaped creature must have used its long tail to stick to the cocoon shortly thereafter, but was quickly trapped and finally completely snuggled in the cocoon. The cocoon hardened after a few hours and sank into the mud. Over time, it turned into fossils, Bomfleur hypothesized.

This type of scientific preservation has only found a single example, a 125-million-year-old cocoon covering a nematode worm found in Svalbard.