“We could solve the mystery of a creature whose nature had remained unknown for 132 years because of its extremely unusual shape,” said Tatsuya Hirasawa, an associate professor at the University of Tokyo who serves as a visiting researcher at Riken. They handed over the bones to Charles Dawson, a lawyer and amateur. A secret until now, the fossil - Ida to the researchers who have painstakingly verified her provenance - is the most complete primate fossil ever found. They said they believe the creature is an intermediate species between lungfish and land vertebrates. The relics were said to have been found in Piltdown, England by workers digging a pit. The researchers compared the characteristics of the bones of Palaeospondylus to those of other vertebrates to determine its position on the evolutionary tree. Lucy is the popular name given to the famous fossil skeleton found in 1974 in Ethiopia by American anthropologist Donald Johanson. And this occurred during the water-to-land transition. The Guardian published this article in 2009, just after a team of Canadian and American scientists found a missing link between modern seals and their land-dwelling ancestors. The shapes of bones change as organisms continue to evolve. The shape of its tail fin is close to that of Acanthostega, an extinct prehistoric amphibian. They found that the creature has commonalities with the coelacanth, a primitive fish that is referred to as a “living fossil,” and the lungfish.įor example, Palaeospondylus possesses an intracranial joint, which separates the front and back of the skull.
The team used the SPring-8 synchrotron radiation facility in Hyogo Prefecture to three-dimensionally analyze two well-preserved fossil specimens embedded in rock. A reconstruction of Palaeospondylus (Provided by Riken)
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