Science: Behold the Mother Fish

Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 5:14:33 pm PDT

An extraordinary fossil discovery in Australia reveals a fish with live offspring attached by an umbilical cord—dating to 380 million years ago, making it the oldest example of vertebrate live birth on record. Scientists at the Museum of Victoria have dubbed her Materpiscis attenboroughi, or “mother fish.”

Here’s the Museum Victoria news release page on this discovery, with some interesting videos.

Today the team announced its latest discovery: a remarkable 380 million year old fossil placoderm fish with intact embryo and mineralised umbilical cord.

The discovery, published in Nature and one of the most significant ever made by Australian scientists, makes the fossil the world’s oldest known vertebrate mother. It also provides the earliest evidence of vertebrate sexual reproduction, wherein the males (which possessed clasping organs similar to modern sharks and rays) internally fertilised females.

This fossil has been named Materpiscis attenboroughi, meaning ‘mother fish’, in honour of Sir David Attenborough, who first drew attention to the significance of the Gogo sites in his 1979 series Life on Earth.

Armour-plated shark-like fishes with no modern relatives, a second placoderm specimen containing three embryos was found earlier in 1986 and only recently recognised. These embryos also provided the first data on their developmental biology, indicating the early sequence of bone formation in the placoderm’s growth stages.

Studied using an ultra-fine CT scanner at the Australian National University in Canberra, such extraordinary preservation in such an old fossil is unprecedented. The team had also previously announced the first 3-D preserved muscle, nerve and circulatory tissues in a Devonian age (380 million year old) fish in 2007 paper in Biology Letters.