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Ancient creatures nicknamed “alien goldfish” had toothy, tongue-like structures in their guts that they fired out of their bodies to catch prey 330 million years ago, but they weren’t so different from some modern-day mollusks in that regard, a new study finds.
Toothed tongue-launcher Typhloesus wellsi was first described in 1973, and has been an evolutionary enigma in scientific circles for many decades. The freaky animal dates from the Carboniferous period (358.9 million to 298.9 million years ago). But fossils of the vaguely fish-like animals were so different from other Carboniferous animals that scientists joked they belonged to extraterrestrials. Now, thanks to some exceptionally well-preserved fossils in Montana, researchers have found that these so-called aliens have a feeding mechanism resembling that of mollusks — a large group of soft-bodied invertebrates that includes snails, clams and octopuses.
Many mollusks have a similar inverted tongue-like structure called a radula, which carnivorous and herbivorous members of the group use to grab food. The researchers, therefore, suspected that the mysterious T. wellsi was an early mollusk.
“We would like to think we’ve solved a small evolutionary conundrum,” lead author Simon Conway Morris, an emeritus professor of paleobiology at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, told Live Science.
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Conway Morris dubbed T. wellsi the “alien goldfish” in a 2005 article published in the journal Astronomy & Geophysics (opens in new tab). He whimsically imagined the species arriving on Earth during the Carboniferous because a visiting intergalactic commodore grew tired of keeping them as pets and threw them into a lagoon, baffling human scientists who found their fossilized remains hundreds of millions of years later.
“Nobody seriously believed that they were extraterrestrial goldfish, but they certainly looked extremely strange,” Conway Morris said. Along with the toothy gut tongue, T. wellsi had a soft body that measured up to 3.5 inches (9 centimeters) long, with a prominent fin at the back to propel them forward.
For the new study, researchers studied T. wellsi specimens acquired by the Royal Ontario Museum and saw that one of them had an exceptionally…
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