You have heard of those ridiculous toddler tethers before, right? Well, it turns out that is not a 21st century invention.
A prehistoric, one-centimeter-long seafloor-dwelling creature, who lived some 430 million years ago (Silurian period), was found fossilized within volcanic ash in Herefordshire, UK, with ten of its young, each at different stages of development, still attached to its body by thin threads.
“Modern crustaceans employ a variety of strategies to protect their eggs and embryos from predators — attaching them to the limbs, holding them under the carapace, or enclosing them within a special pouch until they are old enough to be released — but this example is unique,” said lead author Derek Briggs, Professor of Geology and Geophysics at Yale University, in a media release. “Nothing is known today that attaches the young by threads to its upper surface.”
To reveal the creature, Briggs, along with Mark Sutton of Imperial College of London and colleagues, slowly and carefully grinded away thin layers of the fossil, taking photographs of each section so they could build a 3D reconstruction.
What they found is that the creature is an arthropod, which is a group of segmented animals that includes insects, spiders, and crustaceans. It turns out its head is eyeless and covered by a shield-like structure, according to the researchers.
It has been nicknamed the “The Kite Runner,” after the 2003 novel by Khaled Hosseini because the offspring resemble kites, and its Latin name has been chosen as Aquilonifer spinosus, which translates to “spiny kite-bearer.”
“The attached juveniles only emerged as we processed the fossil to generate the reconstruction,” Briggs said to National Geographic. And at first the team thought that the attached individuals were some sort of parasite, or other animals catching a ride, but the more they examined them, the less likely that seemed.
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The idea of a parasite didn’t hold up because, as the team concluded, the long threads are attached to the spines of the big Aquilonifer, which would put the smaller animals in “a position far from ideal for this kind of feeding,” Briggs explained to National Geographic.
And in terms of a hitchhiking freeloader, “it would have removed them, perhaps using the long front appendages,” Briggs continued.
“The most telling argument for the adult wanting them to be there is that the creature has large and flexible appendages which could certainly have removed the ‘kites’ if it wanted to,” said Sutton to New Scientist. “If it wanted them to be there, the only real possibility is that they were its young.”
The researchers now believe that these threads were used as a parenting strategy to carry offspring away from danger or help them find food.
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Their report was published online the week of April 4 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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