Scientists discover they were wrong about the 500-million-year-old fossil: everything points to a strange animal

A team of scientists has just rewritten part of evolutionary history.

While studying 500-million-year-old fossils from the Cambrian Explosion—an era often described as life’s “Big Bang”—researchers from Durham University made a startling discovery. What they thought was an ancient ancestor of mollusks, possibly bridging a key evolutionary gap, turned out to be something entirely different: a bizarre, spiny creature unlike anything alive today.

A fossil misidentified for decades

The fossil in question, Shishania aculeata, was found in Yunnan, China, and originally believed to be a transitional form between mollusks and their early relatives in the Lophotrochozoa group. That interpretation fit neatly into existing theories of how complex animal life evolved.

But those theories have now been turned on their heads.

New research, published in the journal Science, shows the fossil shares striking features with the “weird and wonderful” group of ancient animals known as the chancelloriids—creatures that looked more like spiny mushrooms than anything else. Long misunderstood, chancelloriids have puzzled paleontologists for years due to their unusual body structure and unclear place in the animal family tree.

What made scientists change their minds?

Martin R. Smith, a paleontologist at Durham University and lead researcher on the project, told Science Illustrated that it was all about perspective—literally.

These fossils had been crushed and distorted over hundreds of millions of years Smith explained. They were folded, wrinkled, and flattened like “a work of fossil origami.” Once they started reconstructing what the creature originally looked like, the team realized they weren’t looking at complex mollusk-like organisms. They were looking at something much simpler—and stranger.

The fossils’ star-shaped spines and slug-like bodies were the clues that finally gave them away.

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