* Astronomy

Iowa geologists have made what they call the "discovery of the decade" - fossils of primitive, jawless fish and ancient soft-bodied creatures that were something like shrimp and scorpions - in exposed rock near Decorah.
The 460-million-year-old specimens are a rare glimpse into the soft-sided critters who lived during one of the many times Iowa was covered by a tropical sea, said geologist Brian Witzke of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources' Geological Survey Bureau in Iowa City.

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A spectacularly quirky creature with long, curved spines protruding from its armoured body prowled the ocean floor half a billion years ago near the dawn of complex life forms on Earth.
In the research, scientists identified an ancient invertebrate they named Orthrozanclus reburrus from 11 complete fossils retrieved from Canada’s fossil-rich Burgess Shale rock formation.
Jean-Bernard Caron of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto,  described the newly identified species along with Simon Conway Morris of the University of Cambridge in Britain.
Orthrozanclus, about one centimetre long, lived about 505 million years ago during the Cambrian Period. The Cambrian was an important moment in the history of life on Earth and a time of radical evolutionary experimentation when many major animal groups first appeared in the fossil record.
This proliferation of life is dubbed the ‘Cambrian Explosion’ because of the relatively brief time span in which this diversity of forms arose.
Orthrozanclus had no eyes and no limbs and apparently moved along the ocean floor with a muscular foot, like a snail does, while dining on bacterial growths.
Orthrozanclus seems to have been built to prevent predators from turning it into a quick snack. It was covered in a shell and had almost three dozen long, pointy, curved spines sticking out from the edge of its body, and many smaller ones, too.
The newly identified invertebrate helps clarify early animal evolution.
The scientists think Orthrozanclus may belong to a newly identified group of organisms characterized by a similar type of body armour, and that this group was related to present-day snails, earthworms and mollusks, which include snails, clams, squid and octopuses.
The researchers described the animal based on complete and beautifully preserved fossils — nine at the Royal Ontario Museum and two at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
The Burgess Shale, an important rock layer from the Cambrian in the Canadian Rockies of southeastern British Columbia, has yielded a treasure trove of fossils from this critical period in the history of life. These include such weirdos as Hallucigenia, a spiky animal so unusual that the scientists who named it seemed to think it was a hallucination, and the predator Anomalocaris with large, grasping limbs, the largest animal found in the Burgess Shale. Some creatures found as fossils in the Burgess Shale are ancestors of animals alive today, while others have long since gone extinct and are not like any existing living thing.

Source Indian daily Times

The origins of complex, multicellular animal life remain somewhat obscure. It appears to have accompanied the rise of oxygen levels over 600 million years ago, but the first animals generally had soft bodies, and left little behind other than impressions in stone. It appears that some of the animal groups that exist today got their start then, but the evidence isn't clear.
The arrival of the Cambrian era brought with it an "explosion" of novel life forms, albeit an explosion that took place gradually over tens of millions of years. In the Cambrian, the development of hard shells and mineralised forms allowed far more types of life to be fossilised. As a result, most of the major groups of animals alive today were preserved, along with a host of what appear to be evolutionary dead ends. Piecing together relationships among these creatures and their modern equivalents has been a challenge, one that creationists of various sorts have latched on to in their attempts to portray evolution as a failed theory.
But this portrayal relies on gaps in our understanding, and gaps in science have a habit of getting filled. One more will be filled by the description of the fossil on the right, which will appear in tomorrow's edition of Science. The newly described creature, termed Orthrozanclus reburrus, shares features with the ancestors of three major groups that are alive today: molluscs (such as clams and squid), annelids (segmented worms), and brachiopods, a type of shellfish that is only distantly related to molluscs. That distant relative appears to have been something very much like this new species.
More specifically, this creature has a long, thick plate with a segmented, convex anterior shell, much like the Halkieria, which gave rise to the brachiopods. But the lateral edges of that plate contain a set of spines with features similar to those found found in Wiwaxiids, which produced the modern annelids. The authors propose a new clade, the Halwaxiids, which encompasses these two previously separate phylogenetic groups. In addition to this pivotal location, the new fossil shares common features with the ancestors of molluscs, which suggests that this creature may be on the branch that led to that lineage.
This new fossil greatly clarifies the phylogenetic tree that describes the origin of these three modern groups, as it suggests the features that a common ancestor of all three should share. Those features appear in a group of fossils called Kimberella-Odontogriphus which previously had been difficult to place relative to other lineages; thanks to the new fossil, they appear to be at their base of all three branches.

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On January 12, 2007, the study entitled ‘Picobiliphytes: A marine picoplanktonic algal group with unknown affinities to other Eukaroytes’ will be published in the scientific journal Science.
An international group of researchers has succeeded in identifying a previously unknown group of algae. As currently reported in the scientific journal Science, the newly discovered algae are found among the smallest members of photosynthetic plankton - the picoplankton (‘Picobiliphytes: A marine picoplanktonic algal group with unknown affinities to other Eukaroytes” Science, Vol. 316’). On account of the minute size of the organisms (no more than a few thousandth of a millimetre) and the appearance of phycobili-proteins, researchers have termed the new group Picobiliphyta.