Comment on the elder gods
Maroon@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I thought soft-tissue didn’t fossilise. Cephalopods don’t have skeletons, then what exactly is getting fossilised here?
Happened all the time. It just depends on the environment. Check out basically anything on the “Tully monster” if you want to know more.
Tully monsters are actually even older than OPs fossil and we have no idea where they came from or where they went, from an evolutionary perspective.
Ok.
I mean, there were weird things in the waters at the time and those grabber noses(?) were all the hype.
Iirc the closest modern day relative is some form of sea slug. How you go from spore to slug has got to be a wild journey
I know those guys and know what happened to them
They were my creations in Spore and went extinct after trying to sing their way into the heart of some purple, venomous, bipedal creature
AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
There are different types of fossils, some of which apply to soft tissue:
Impression: A shallow imprint of a fossil organism that does not retain any organic material.
Compression: A fossil that has been crushed or flattened but retains some organic material, although it has been chemically altered.
Carbonization: A process that occurs during fossilization in which complex organic molecules are converted into a more stable carbon compound that generally has a dark brown color.
This appears to be an impression fossil.
Geodad@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I’ll add that the entire organism can fossilize in an anoxic environment with rapid burial.