Scientists discover missing evolution puzzle piece in 130-million-year-old rocks. The discovery is a result of an international collaboration, in which thebeing a dominant element in contemporary deep-sea ecosystems, there has been no fossil evidence of deep-sea fishes older than 50 million years. Now, the recent unearthing of exceptionally rare fossils provides the earliest known evidence of deep-sea fishes.
Using photogrammetry, scientists delivered a photo-textured height map of fossil feeding pits and trails. These represent the earliest evidence for deep-sea vertebrates. Credit: Girolamo Lo Russo Such extreme conditions required adaptations for deep-sea life that are evolutionary innovations as significant as those that allowed the colonization of the land and the air, such as wings and limbs, for example.
The Apennine fossils force scientists to reconsider which factors might have triggered the vertebrate colonization of the deep sea. The authors propose that the trigger was the unprecedented input of organic matter that occurred between the Lateand the Early Cretaceous. The availability of food in the deep seas favored bottom-dwelling worms, which, in turn, attracted fishes that used specific behaviors to expose them.