"Truly orgasmic", right up until the part about the teeth

I love this stuff:

Paleontologists have created detailed three-dimensional images of evolution's first multicellular creatures in their embryonic stages, some so detailed that they reveal more about the development of long-extinct creatures than scientists know about their modern counterparts

Using x-rays and computers, they're looking back through time to the beginning of complex life on Earth.

Some of the embryos exhibit hitherto unknown mechanisms of embryonic development that have since gone extinct. Others have combinations of traits that put them near the lowest branches of the animal kingdom's evolutionary tree.

"The results are truly orgasmic," said Philip C. Donoghue, a paleontologist at Bristol University in England who led the team that created the images.

Ok, he's a paleontologist, so I guess that this would float his boat.

Using the new technique, he and his colleagues have been able to create cutaways, cross-sections and, by stringing together images of embryos at different stages of development, virtual time-lapse sequences of the animals' metamorphosis.

Cartoons for the uber-brainiac.

The images show that one fossil embryo known by the scientific name Markuelia must be most closely related to a modern group of marine invertebrates known as the penis worms, based on the number of teeth it has and the way they are arranged.

Whoa. What was that again?!?!?!

...a modern group of marine invertebrates known as the penis worms, based on the number of teeth...

I've heard of snapping... uh, never mind.

Another image shows that a segmented creature known as Pseudooides had a very unusual means of assembling itself. Modern segmented animals either develop all of their segments early and then simply get bigger, or they grow by adding segments to their hind ends.

But Pseudooides added its segments in the middle, "which is really totally bizarre," Donoghue said.

And that's saying something, considering he can talk about penis worms with teeth like it's no big thang.

Posted by Ted at August 10, 2006 04:40 PM | TrackBack
Category: SciTech