Novel Studies of Decomposition Shed New Light On Our Earliest Fossil Ancestry

Decaying corpses are usually the domain of forensic scientists, but paleontologists have discovered that studying rotting fish sheds new light on our earliest ancestry.

The researchers, from the Department of Geology at the University of Leicester, devised a new method for extracting information from 500 million-year-old fossils -they studied the way fish decompose to gain a clearer picture of how our ancient fish-like ancestors would have looked. Their results indicate that some of the earliest fossils from our part of the tree of life may have been more complex than has previously been thought.

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Image credit: Mark Purnell, Rob Sansom, Sarah Gabbott, University of Leicester