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VOL.453 NO.7195 DATED 29 May 2008
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Relics: Live birth in the Devonian (pp 650-652)
It seems that neither the chicken nor the egg came first. Scientists in Nature this week unveil a 380-million-year-old specimen of an embryo connected by the umbilical cord to its mother long before the chicken came on the scene. The discovery, a new species in itself, reveals advanced reproductive biology comparable to that of some modern sharks and rays.
The placoderms, now long extinct, were a large and diverse group of fishes, thought to be the most primitive known vertebrates with jaws. John Long and colleagues’ fossil find shows they were not so primitive that they could not give birth to live young. The relic is from the Late Devonian Gogo Formation of Australia and represents a new species of placoderm preserved in the act of giving birth. Examples in the fossil record of animals giving birth are extremely rare and this new specimen extends the known record of live birth back by some 200 million years. The authors have named their fossil in honour of Sir David Attenborough, who first drew attention to the Gogo fish sites in the 1979 series Life on Earth.
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