Half-billion-year-old parasite still threatens shellfish
A new study has discovered that a common parasite of modern oysters started infecting bivalves hundreds of millions of years before the dinosaurs went extinct.
Rare fossils show that worms survived multiple mass extinction events. The research, published in iScience, used high-resolution 3D scans to examine 480-million-year-old shells from a Moroccan site.
The scans revealed distinctive patterns etched on the surface and inside the fossils.
“The marks weren’t random scratches,”said Karma Nanglu, a UC Riverside paleobiologist.
“We saw seven or eight of these perfect question mark shapes on each shell fossil. That’s a pattern.”
Author's summary: Ancient parasite still infects shellfish today.
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