Radio Cadena Agramonte emisiora de Camagüey
Climate change and asteroids are linked to the origin and extinction of animals, but tectonic plates also appears to play a key evolutionary role, new research from an international team led by researchers at Flinders University, Australia reveals.
The discovery of an exceptionally well-preserved early Devonian coelacanth fish fossil (419 and 359 million years ago) in remote Western Australia, in the Gogo geological formation, is linked to a period of increased tectonic activity or movement in theterrestrial crust, indicates an article about the study, in which experts from Canada, Australia and Europe participated.
The fossil, which belongs to Latimeria, a genus of fish that has inhabited the planet's oceans for more than 400 million years, also helped understand an important transition period in the history of coelacanths, which extends between more primitive forms. and more anatomically modern.
The analysis of the remains of the specimen, called Ngamugawi wirngarri, allows us to assume that the activity of the tectonic plates had a profound influence on the rates of evolution of coelacanths, according to Dr. Alice Clement, evolutionary biologist and paleontologist at the high house of studies.
"The more the large plates of the Earth's crust moved, the more likely it was that new species would appear," the authors argue in an article in The Conversation.
Today, the coelacanth is a fascinating deep-sea fish that lives off the coasts of East Africa and Indonesia and can reach up to 2 meters in length.
In the last 410 million years, more than 175 species of coelacanths have been discovered worldwide. During the Mesozoic, the era of the dinosaurs, coelacanths diversified significantly, and some species developed unusual body shapes. However, during the so-called end-Cretaceous extinction, caused by an asteroid impact about 66 million years ago, they mysteriously disappeared from the fossil record.
Thus, coelacanth fish were assumed to have been victims of the same mass extinction event. However, in 1938 a live coelacanth specimen was captured on the eastern coast of South Africa, which acquired cult status in the world of biological evolution. Some are now occasionally found in deep waters near the coast of East Africa and Indonesia.
According to another co-author of the research, vertebrate paleontologist Richard Cloutier of the University of Quebec in Rimouski, Canada, the study published in Nature Communications challenges the idea that surviving coelacanths are the oldest 'living fossils'.
"As we slowly fill in the gaps, we can begin to understand how living Latimeria coelacanth species, which are commonly considered living fossils, are actually continuing to evolve and might not deserve such an enigmatic title," Cloutier commented. (Text and photos: RT)
