The oldest known muscle tissues have been found, researchers report, in the fossilized tissues of a soft-bodied creature that shares an ancestor with modern sea anemones, jellyfish and corals.
The 560-million-year-old fossil bears an impression of muscles as fibers arranged in parallel bundles, said Alexander G. Liu, a paleobiologist at the University of Cambridge in England and the lead author of a new study in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
“They are preserved in a very similar way to jellyfish tissue throughout the fossil record,” he said.
Dr. Liu and his colleagues from England and Canada discovered the fossil in Newfoundland in 2008 and suspected that they might have stumbled on muscle tissue.
“We wanted to be sure,” Dr. Liu said, “so we spent time comparing it to the fossil record and to modern organisms.”
Known as Haootia quadriformis, the fossil is one of the few animals clearly identifiable from the Ediacaran Period, about 635 million to 541 million years ago.
“There are about 200 known species from the Ediacaran,” Dr. Liu said, “and only about a 10th of them have been classified.”
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