Underwhelming Fossil Fish of the Month: October 2014

October has been a bumper month for not-so-underwhelming-fossil-fish with show off species Microbrachius dicki making headlines early this month for inventing penetrative sex (although of course you and I know that this hyberbolic reporting conflates the ever so slight nudging of oldest evidence of internal fertilisation in our branch of the tree of life with the invention of sex but, hey, at least it got reported). However, it does mean that in order to keep the fossil fish hype-ometer at a steady level we’re going to have to go really underwhelming in this month’s exploration of underwhelming fossil fish to even it out.

I think I’ve done it though. Be prepared for the dullest underwhelming fossil fish of the month ever. It’s less exciting than this image of the reverse of 2013’s Loganellia scotica. Yes, it’s duller than the fossil most notable for its similarity to a pavement slab. I’d recommend painting a wall and watching the paint dry after reading this because you’ll need something to get your heart racing again.

Ladies, gentlemen and the ever present alien overlords watching us from space and monitoring our Internet traffic whilst deciding when to invade or not, I present to you a bunch of fossil fish fragments, AKA LDUCZ-V1157

Of course, the downside to finding such an awful collection of specimens is that there isn’t much to say about them. Palaeontologists better than I could probably have a stab at working out what these bits are anatomically. the long ones could be ribs, jaws, fin ray or fin spines I guess. They have striation-like striations on them. I’d describe the flat square bits as definitely being flat and square shaped and possibly bits of a skull. There’s a white chalky, clayey substance on the jaw/rib/fin spine which could be chalk or clay. It is definitely white. The two smaller triangle pieces could be the neural spines of vertebrae. Curiously, our old card index and fossil catalogue archive both end on the specimen numerically before this one seemingly as if the cataloguer gave up after numbering them and couldn’t bring themselves to add these to the archive.

Preservation Slightly poor at best.

Research [PADDING THIS SECTION OUT BEGINS HERE] Believe it or not, in palaeobiology, more has been done with even less than we have here, entire species described from a single vertebra or finger bone. Palaeobiological species stretch the definition of what we confidently call a species. With organisms still alive today, we separate species by their DNA, anatomy, morphology and also their habitat and ecology. Species also exist as political concepts with individuals attributed to certain species being protected, controlled, illegal to own, illegal to hunt or even illegal to breed in a laboratory (think bacteria and viruses). In palaeobiology however, we examine and identify remains in an attempt to recreate the biodiversity and ecologies of long gone ecosystems. Even though reconstructing an entire new species or animal from a single tooth or bone is obviously a stretch, sound principles in comparative anatomy allow palaeobiologists to confidently recreate the kind of organism a single bone came from given current available evidence. Later it may be that a whole organism is found in the fossil record and then we can reassess previous reconstructions. This happens a lot in palaeobotany where you can’t necessarily unite isolated root, stem, leaf and flower fossils until you find a complete fossil. In the past this system was abused by palaeobiologists trying to make a name for themselves by describing every fossil as a new species. Today, most palaeobiologists only describe material that we can ‘objectively’ say is different enough to probably represent a distinct species. Back to these fossils then, no [PADDING ENDS]. No there’s no research on these and nor will there ever be (although I’d love to be proved wrong). Firstly because the material is rather fragmentary and secondly because we don’t know where these fossils came from. Even if we had a rough locality, we could ‘cheat’ by comparing it to other fossils found in that area and assess whether this represents a kind of organism never described before but alas we don’t even have that.

In Society When there’s nothing to say in this section, I do what every palaeobiologist does when faced wth such a dire situation, I turn to poetry:

Fragments of My Fossil Drawer

The long bits could be ribs

The square bits could be skull

As an assortment with a number

These fragments are quite dull

Unidentified fossil fish fragments

Preservation 1.5
Research 0
In Society 0.2 (for the above poem)
Underwhelmingness 9.8

Mark Carnall is the Curator of the Grant Museum of Zoology