Slashdot Mirror
Eight-Armed Animal Preceded Dinosaurs
Garimelda writes "Scientists have discovered what they believe is an eight-armed creature which colonized a large section of the world's oceans over 300 million years before the first dinosaurs emerged."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I thought Spore was a game?
Next up. Scientists discover Slinky like organism as missing link between Apes and Man.
Eight-armed, in the sense that a starfish is five-armed. Not quite as sci-fi weird as the headline might sound.
They became Krakens!
I am not a scientist!
erroneous: look me up in a dictionary
Ladies and gentlemen, the plot to next year's summer movie flop.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
Sounds similar to the octospiders featured in the Rama sequels. Okay, not really, I just felt like throwing out references to pop science fiction.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Maybe four limbs gives you more bang for the buck in terms of the energy of development and survival locomotion. However insects and relatives have been more creative with all even numbers - 2, 4, 6, 8 and dozens.
So this thing sounds a lot like a octopus.
So I would take it that these creatures would have invented personal deoderant before the wheel?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The passing of our 8 legged, sea dwelling, Gondwanalandish ancestral overlords
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Awcjsadfjhcsdfhadhfaoesuhfeobncosadcu!!!!!
It will soon be discoverd that two quadrupeds can be killed with one stone.
Cthulu--the ancient one!
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
I recall people studying the evolution of locomotion by allowing any kind of movement- walking, tumbling, slithering, wheels, etc. Computer programs "evolve" trying random mutations and look at resulting locomotive efficiency. Some clever, unexpected solutions result which you dont see in nature. I forget the reference, but may be associated with the Sante Fe Artificial Life Institute, etc.
I'll believe ID when they find a fossilized watch.
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
I was thinking more like a half fish half humanoid eight armed sea monster from an ancient and extinct civilization.
What's wrong with me? Have I really reached a point in my life where a subscription to national enquirer might be in order??
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
Embrace....extend....extinguish...
THERE'S your prior art! :P ....ok, ok, back under the bridge I go....
.....someone played Spore a bit too much...
...they describe other early living things that looked like leaves, shells, stars and something almost akin to a peace symbol.
Damn hippie fossils!
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
I'll believe in fossilized watches once somebody proves intelligence...
Help test the
Given the time scales involved, that's kind of like saying "Alexander preceded Napoleon" -- I mean, it's true, but it leaves out a whole lot that happened in between.
Oh, never mind. The past is telescoped. There's old stuff (things that happened before my parents were born) older stuff (George Washington and other guys in funny clothes) very old stuff (King Arthur and Robin Hood) extremely old stuff (cavemen and dinosaurs) and, apparently, incredibly old stuff (before cavemen and dinosaurs -- who knew?) No point in asking people to maintain a sense of persepective.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I'll believe ID when they find a fossilized watch.
It's even still hard to believe... http://www.fossil.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ContentView?langId=-1&storeId=12052&catalogId=10052&categoryId=30005&parent_category_rn=30000&N=0&contentPageHtml=watch_non_catalog
Check those noodly appendages... intelligent design indeed!
Just further proof that the Flying Spaghetti Monster's great tentacle guides us all across the saucy plate of life
So... it's an eight armed starfish? Astounding.
Perhaps back then female populations were much higher, therefore every male needed as many hands as he could get
To me, the most interesting aspect of these early, pre-Cambrian-Explosion fossils was that bilateral symmetry (which is the norm for practically all animal life today) was nothing special. You had lots of organisms that were radially symmetric or just plain asymmetric. Whatever mass extinction event wiped out the majority of the Ediacaran biota gave a foothold to the bilaterally symmetric ancestors of modern animal life, which then dominated the Cambrian Explosion. It is just a fluke of evolution that we are not radially symmetric or asymmetric. Shades of Niven & Pournelle's Moties!
... and stopped by a time machine toilet.
cthulhu?
So we could torment the VP with news like this.
I wonder what Dawkins will say about this. It's undeniable!
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
No, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is in outer space. There's a Hubble picture of it at the supplied link.
Free Martian Whores!
Especially if it's a DIGITAL watch that has subsequently gone extinct.
At the Mountains of Madness.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If the stone's big enough, you can kill far more than 2. *nodnod*
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Sounds closer to these guys to me.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
the wonderful Hallucigenia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucigenia
Called because the discover thought he was seeing things!
so they found a small octopus?
I wonder whether they would have invented aerosol deodorant before the wheel.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Even if I'm a straight man, I'd run away like hell if I ever saw a woman with eight vaginas.
This was probably made by Italians. Be careful, America! Eternal vigilance!
I have eight vaginas, you insensitive clod!
(And eight penises on the other side. But shhhhh, do not tell him. He better has eight orifices. Huar, huar, huar,... *drool*...)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
That's funny, it looks like a fossilized butthole to me.
i'm off topic on this one, but I never did understand why the assumption was always made that got created creatures the way they exist today. When the Bible says man who says they were refering to the first bi-ped. Who isn't to say the Bible wasn't refering to the final iteration of homosapain. Just food for thought here not trying to start a new religion.
Made in His image!
When I enlarged the photo, the putty impression looked a lot like a nipple.
Maybe mammalian nipples originated from an ancient symbiosis with these creatures!
Looks like a miniature replica of a galaxy...maybe the circle does keep perpetuating.
I think he'd say something like this:
"Hey everyone, I'm British! Look at me! Look! Look damn you!"
I hate printers.
1. Well, you have to also realize that different environments might favour different configurations. For example an octopus doesn't use its noodly appendages in the same way as you use your legs, and not even like a fish uses its fins.
Each is optimized for its particular use. It's safe to assume that for a fish that particular tail and fin configuration is good, because it evolved several times from something different to that exact configuration. E.g., dolphins evolved to the same scheme, but so did Ichthyosaurs, Plesiosaurs and Mosasaurs, plus a few of their relatives and ancestors. There are two different configurations of four legs which evolved into such a fish-like configuration that Ichthyosaur skeletons were first believed to be fish. So it's safe to assume that for that style of swimming, a fish-like configuration is optimal, and indeed better than four legs or even than two legs.
Two legs vs four legs also seems to be not that clear cut. The two-legged configuration evolved independently more than once, so it must have _some_ advantages. E.g., all dinosaurs are descendants of a two-legged ancestor. Some, however, returned to four-legged afterwards. Some evolved into birds instead. So again it's probably safe to say that each is good... for a given environment.
Insects are a funny case, because again they're used differently than you use your legs. Insect legs are autonomous. Each leg has its own autonomous "controller", or rather its own mini-brain. The insect's head just gives an order like "forward" and all legs independently start doing the movements for moving forward. That kind of a wiring would be totally unfit for bipedal use. Heck, even four would be more miss than hit. So an insect must necessarily have a larger number of legs. For the way an insect is built, really, six legs are good, two legs are bad.
2. But even that is over-thinking it, because the little guys in TFA didn't actually have arms or legs like you. They were really jellyfish with 8 long tubular appendages. There are no muscles there or bones or exoskeleton or anything usable for locomotion at all. The whole thing was really two thin layers of cells, little more than a microbial film, with an amorphous jelly in between. The "arms" were probably more to give it more surface and reach from which it can absorb nutrients, than for anything else.
We're talking _very_ primitive multi-cellular life forms.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So big whoop. They were like 25 cents in gumball machines. You'd throw them at windows and they'd slowly crawl down. Can't wait til someone unearths a gummy bracelet or a Swatch watch...
Cthulhu fhtagn!
I'll believe ID when they find a fossilized watch.
This looks practically fossilized =P http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
"In the Image of $DEITY Created $DEITY_PRONOUN It" - like Yoda you speak.
Mini-galaxies... maybe we live inside a planet's ocean of dark matter populated by galaxies.
Those 'limbs' are in an exceptionally regular spiral pattern. If you fossilized an octopus, you'd expect the limbs to be all crossed over and tangled up. I'm guessing that those 'limbs' couldn't move independently, and are more like ridges in a sheet of material.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
squidbillies
certainly smarter than the idiot who claimed it to be a new species. never heard of an octopus?
Besides, this is definite proof that Goro from Mortal Kombat existed at some time:
http://mkw.mortalkombatonline.com/mka/goro/cutout.png
It's quite obvious, he was bitten by a radioactive spider and grew the extra arms. Then he found out how expensive fuel was going to be in 2008 and killed himself hundreds of thousands of years in advance.
Either that, or The Simpsons was right...
Favorite artificial language: - Klingon - Qindarin - Java - Jabba the Hutt's gibberish - CowboyNealish - music
Octopuses are going to be pissed that missed the 8 arms frist prost.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
We all know from hentai about multi-limb ancient creatures from asia...
Mind the frickin' laser...
as anyone with a saltwater fishtank can tell you, that looks like nothing more than an 8-limbed brittle or serpent star, presumably without a mouth.
Hah! *Our* god has a penis! Neener.
Should be enough even for emacs
How did the archaeologists discover that it was named Gondwana?
This router requires a 4chan GOLD account.
You will not be able to use a internet unless you have a gold account.
It has 8 arms, how many legs does it have?
RAmen!
... the Jatravartid people would not be the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel. [/geek]
You fuckwit.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid your neighbors' wallets and give you their money.
Especially not, I would like to point out, when that "neighbor" is 100 - 1000 times richer than you. Less tax breaks for the super-rich, please.
Sorry, I just had to comment on the sig.
FIGHT THE POWAH!
Soft-bodied, dome-shaped they say. With slim slender arms. I know what this is. It's evidence of the Flying Spaghetti (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster) Monster with a spaghetti bowl on it's head crawling round creating the world....
Oh ...come...on....
Have you no humor? :(
My humor is crazy, and I love it exactly for this! :P
You don't know what's funny.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
That's about as intelligent and mature as Dawkins himself.