If you think pregnancy is rough, just imagine having bearing multiple offspring at once—and having them tethered in capsules to your spine. That apparently was the reality of a newly-discovered ancient animal, which carried its young in capsules attached to its body, looking like tassels or little kites.
The tiny creature is about 430 million years old and is an arthropod—an animal lacking a backbone but covered in an exoskeleton with its body in segments. It has now been named Aquilonifer spinosus—a play off of the title of the 2003 bestselling novel The Kite Runner. “Aquila” is the Latin word for eagle or kite (the bird), and “fer” is a Latin suffix meaning carrier or bearer. Discovered in Herefordshire, England, it is the only known fossil of this animal ever found.
Making discoveries by studying fossils
This unique find was studied by researchers from Yale, Oxford, the University of Leicester, and Imperial College London. According to their paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they examined the animal by creating a 3D reconstruction of the fossil.
“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, Yale professor and curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, in a statement.
“Nothing is known today that attaches the young by threads to its upper surface.”
In fact, the “kite carrier” animal fossil has 10 juveniles—all at different stages of development—attached to the adult. The scientists believe that this means the adult wouldn’t be able to molt until its young were old enough to hatch—elsewise, it would accidentally cast off the young as it shed off its exoskeleton.
Some may be wondering if these ten juveniles are in fact parasites on Aquilonifer, but Briggs and his colleagues have ruled this out as the place where the juveniles attach isn’t the best for accessing nutrients from the host. Instead, it truly appears to be a parent “Kite Runner” with its offspring.
“We have named it after the novel by Khalid Hosseini due to the fancied resemblance of the juveniles to kites,” Briggs said. “As the parent moved around, the juveniles would have looked like decorations or kites attached to it. It shows that arthropods evolved a variety of brooding strategies beyond those around today — perhaps this strategy was less successful and became extinct.”
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Image credit: D. Briggs, D. Siveter, D. Siveter, M. Sutton, D. Legg
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