Scientists newly discovered a 506-Million-year-old sea creature that looks like a “Sci-Fi Kaiju”. A fossil species of Mosura fentoni was named after “Mothra”. This discovery has completely changed the scientists understanding about early animal life in the Cambrian period.
It was unearthed from Canada’s Burgess Shale which is a world-renowned site famous for its exceptional preservation of soft-bodied organisms.
The discovery and the research findings were published in some of the Science journals. As per the researcher’s findings the sea creature “Mosura fentoni” lived about 506 million years ago.
Some of the interest findings about this sea creature are:
- It possessed three eyes
- Clawed limbs for swimming
- It has a unique segmented long tail with 16 small sections each covered with gills
- It is much smaller, about the size of a human finger
- A specialized feeding disk
Mosura fentoni belongs to a group known as Radiodonts. Among the 61 fossils examined, scientists identified preserved nerve tissues, eye structures, and even a digestive tract. Remarkably, some specimens also show reflective patches interpreted as parts of an open circulatory system—essentially a heart pumping blood into body cavities called lacunae.
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This level of preservation is extraordinary and sheds light on the complexity of early animal physiology.
These fossils were collected over the past 5 decades by the Royal Ontario Museum from the Burgess Shale area, specifically Yoho and Kootenay National Parks. The region was once an ancient seafloor, and its conditions allowed soft-bodied organisms like Mosura to fossilize with exceptional detail.
Radiodonts are an extinct lineage of early Arthropods best known for the fearsome Anomalocaris.
Anomalocaris was a large predator with spiny limbs and a circular toothed mouth. The tail part functionality is strange – it allowed he animal to survive in low-oxygen environments or sustain an active lifestyle.
There always seems to be something new and surprising about Radiodonts. Mosura is different in its segment as they are small and they have only tiny flaps that would have been basically useless for propulsion.