Strange Symmetries #05: Enigmatic Eldoniids

Fossils of cambroernids were first discovered in the early 1900s, but these Paleozoic animals were so confusing that for a long time their evolutionary relationships were a mystery.

They had coiled bodies and fractal-branching feeding tentacles, and they ranged in shape from worm-like to cup-like to disc-like. Historically various species were classified as sea cucumbers, jellyfish, tunicates, gnathiferans, or lophophorates, but more recently they’ve been recognized as a single united lineage of ambulacrarians, closely related to modern echinoderms and hemichordates.

Discophyllum peltatum lived during the late Ordovician, about 458-448 million years ago, in what is now New York, USA. Up to around 11cm in diameter (~4.3″), it was one of the disc-shaped cambroernids – a lineage known as eldoniids – with a shallow domed body containing a clockwise-coiling sac and delicate feeding tentacles around its mouth.

Its disc would have been tough but flexible, containing numerous supporting radial structures that were probably part of a fluid-filled hydrostatic skeleton, giving it an almost-radially-symmetric body plan superficially resembling a jellyfish.

The lifestyle of eldoniids is still uncertain, but they seem to have mostly sat on the seafloor, possibly extending their tentacles out from under their discs to grab nearby food.

Cambrian Explosion Month #14: Phylum(?) Cambroernida

Modern hemichordates and echinoderms are the closest living relatives of each other, part of a larger lineage of deuterostome animals known as ambulacrarians – but they also seem to have had some other strange cousins during the Cambrian.

Cambroernids were a bizarre group with branching feeding tentacles and a gut enclosed in a coiled sac. They came in a range of forms from worm-like to cup-like to disc-shaped, and despite their fossils being known since the early 1900s their evolutionary affinities were a longstanding problem. Various species had been interpreted in the past as sea cucumbers, jellyfish, tunicates, gnathiferans, or lophophorates, but in recent years they’ve been recognized as all being related, and linked to the ambulacrarians.

And it’s still not entirely clear where in that group they actually belong. They were probably a weird early stem lineage, but they might also be early stem-hemichordates or stem-echinoderms.

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