What may be one of Earth’s earliest animals has a punk rock vibe
Remains once thought to be decomposed material could be spongelike creatures, researchers say
This illustration shows what one of Earth’s earliest animals — a newly identified spongelike creature named after a punk rocker due to its spiky appearance — might have looked like. It’s shown here settled on top of another organism.
Duncan McIlroy
Being a punk rocker means being perpetually misunderstood. So perhaps it’s vindication that that some seafloor fossils, once considered just piles of decomposing gunk, may now be reclassified as animals — and fittingly named after punk rocker John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, of the Sex Pistols.
The newly named Lydonia jiggamintia was once thought to be a pseudofossil called Blackbrookia. But it might instead be a rare Precambrian animal, which would make L. jiggamintia one of the earliest animals in the fossil record, researchers report September 16 in Palaeontologia Electronica.
Paleontologist Christopher McKean and colleagues analyzed 39 Blackbrookia fossils found off the coast of Newfoundland, some ironically near a spot called Mistaken Point. The area is home to some of the world’s oldest animal fossils, including a 570-million-year-old jellyfish discovered in 2024, as well as many pseudofossils, decomposed organic matter that can look like fossils. The analyzed samples were found in an area that dates from about 560 million years ago, says McKean, who was part of the research team while at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s, Canada.
L. jiggamintia looked like a punk rocker having a good hair day. The animal’s fingerlike tubes projected vertically into the water over pores on its topside, which indicate it was filter feeder, the team says. The creature was long — almost 53 centimeters in some cases. It was rounded at one end and pointed at the other, and probably had a domed upper body, which would’ve collapsed once it died. Because it probably set up home on top of other organisms, its shape could’ve been dictated by whatever was underneath.
Apart from the punk rocker hair inspiration, the name jiggamintia is a nod to a spiky wild fruit called jiggamint by the Beothuk peoples who settled in the Newfoundland region thousands of years before European settlers arrived and are now culturally extinct. (The fruit is now called a gooseberry).
L. jiggamintia looks similar to a sponge in structure and shape and is a possible ancestor of some modern sponges, McKean says. In fact, it was the spongelike pores that tipped off researchers it was an animal and not the ancient remains of random gunk.
Precambrian animal fossils are very rare, particularly ones that might be linked to species still in existence, says McKean, now at the University of Essex in England. Any new discovery, he notes, is significant in aiding our understanding of early life.
