MOBULA RAYS: FEASTING ON THE HIGH SEAS

This beautiful fellow is a Mobula Ray. They have graced our seas, undulating hypnotically for millions of years. We once thought these filter feeders were passive plankton eaters. That is mostly true but not always true. They do swim with their mouths open, taking in the wee micronutrients the ocean has on offer, but they also gather to hunt in the high seas.

I saw a wonderful expose, the Blue Planet, earlier this year with David Attenborough as narrator. The program showed some wonderful footage with great pods of dolphins, 10,000 members strong, pushing deep-sea Laternfish up from the depths to dine upon them. Once the dolphins and trailing Tuna had had their fill, rows of Mobulas swooped in with their mouths open to feast on these small mesopelagic fish. The water was a frenzy of fish scales and the aptly named 'Flying Mobulas.' They were an impressive sight, arriving in tight formation to best capitalize on a beautiful feast.

PROTOASTER HAEFNERI

This beautiful specimen is Protoaster Haefneri, a new species of edrioasteroid, an extinct lower Cambrian genus of echinoderm from the Kinzers Formation of York County, Pennsylvania.

The specimen was found by and named after Chris Haefner, and is set to be "unveiled" this September at a conference in Moscow, Russia.

He is one of only two specimens of this new lower Cambrian genus of echinoderm found in the 520 million years shales of the Kinzers. The specimens were collected during field work in 2017 and 2018 and form the basis of the research to be published this Fall by Dr. Samuel Zamora of Spain.

Protoaster Haefneri was a mobile bulbous creature (about the size of a smaller onion) with feeding tendrils extended from the sides of his pentaradial body plan. All living echinoderms share a body plan with pentaradial symmetry, but interestingly they start out as larvae with bilateral symmetry, suggesting an evolutionary history of bilaterian ancestors evolving into pentaradiate forms. This specimen and one other went into collections at the Natural History Museum of London in December 2018, as NHMUK PI EE 16659 and 16660. It will be interesting to compare this specimen to echinoderms from the early Cambrian of Morocco and the body plans of two major echinoderm clades, the pelmatozoans and eleutherozoans and their divergence.

Along with this new edrioasteroid, other Cambrian fauna were discovered, including delicate soft-bodied creatures we think of from the middle Cambrian, 508 million year old, Burgess Shale and trilobites matching species from the lesser known and slightly older, lower Cambrian Eager Formation, near Cranbrook, British Columbia.

The locality is plentiful. Field work revealed two massive complete Anomalocarid (six and eight inches in length; one a new species); a new species of brown algae, over a hundred specimens of the cupcake-looking echinoderm, Camptostroma roddyi, upwards of four hundred Olenellus trilobites and forty complete Wannerias.

We'll definitely be seeing more photos and fauna from this productive 20-acre hilltop site. I'm rather hoping this flood of specimens will rekindle excitement into the naming of Wanneria, and perhaps someone taking up the mantle to continue the as yet unpublished work of Lisa Bohach.

TEMPLO PALENQUE

Templo de las Inscripciones Palenque

POSIDONIA ERUENDOS

Early Jurassic Ichthyosaur Paddle

This beautifully preserved Ichthyosaur paddle with its incredible detail is from Early Jurassic (183 Million Years) deposits in the Ohmden, Posidonia Shale Formation, Baden-Württemberg, east of the Rhine, southwestern Germany.