© Benjamin Bomfleur
Researchers discovered the teardrop-shape creature in Antarctica recently.
About 200 million years ago, a leech released a slimy mucous cocoon that unwittingly encased and trapped a bizarre animal with a springy tail, preserving it until researchers discovered the teardrop-shaped creature in Antarctica recently.
The cocoon looks like those produced by living leeches, such as the
medicinal leech Hirudo medicinalis. Encased inside was a bell animal that looked similar to species in the genus
Vorticella; its body extends 25 microns (about the width of some human hairs) with a tightly coiled stalk about twice that long. And like all eurkaryotes, the organism was equipped with a nucleus - in this case, a large horseshoe-shaped nucleus inside the main body. (A micron is one-millionth of a meter.)
This bell animal lived during the Late Triassic Period, when the Earth was much warmer, with dense rain forests flourishing along what is today the
Transantarctic Mountain Range where it was found. At the time, Antarctica was part of the supercontinent Gondwana, though it was still located at high latitudes.
Past research has suggested this coiled stalk, which is used to attach to substrates, may be one of the
fastest cellular engines known, changing from a telephone wirelike structure to a tight coil at a speed of about 8 centimeters (3.1 inches) per second - the equivalent of a human being walking the across more than three football fields in one second.
Preserving soft tissue
Possibly even more amazing is the fact that this soft-bodied, microscopic creature survived the vagaries of time. Preserving a soft-bodied organism like this one for so long is tricky and requires some outside intervention to keep the tissues from degrading. In this case, rather than tree resin (called amber when hardened) that preserved
dino DNA in the bellies of amber-trapped mosquitoes in
Jurassic Park, a mucous cocoon did the trick.
Comment: Actually, no. Professor of planetary science, John S. Lewis, found that it's more like once every 300 years:
Comet and Asteroid Impact Hazards on a Populated Earth: Computer Modeling by John S. Lewis