Eight-Armed Animal Preceded Dinosaurs
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http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/10/30/eight-arm-animal.html
Oct. 30, 2008 -- An eight-armed creature that looked more like a modern party favor than a living animal colonized a large section of the world's oceans over 300 million years before the first dinosaurs emerged, suggests a new study.The findings represent the first comparable animal fossils from the Ediacaran Period, 635 to 541 million years ago, which appear in two drastically different preservation environments -- black shale of South China and quartz rock of South Australia.
"According to paleogeographic reconstructions, South China and South Australia were close to each other at the time, belonging to a supercontinent called Gondwana," lead author Maoyan Zhu told Discovery News.
Zhu, a scientist at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, first helped to make the China/Aussie connection two years ago during a Beijing conference. He showed a photo of the unusual eight-armed creature, called Eoandromeda octobrachiata, to co-author James Gehling of the South Australia Museum.
