Motherfish Attenborough
Museum Victoria (Oz) - Mother fish
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
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I thought this story was particularly funny when I saw it yesterday cuz Peter and I have been watching David Attenborough’s The Life of Birds
Anyway, I think David Attenborough is so cute. He has this thing he does which sometimes reminds me of Lewis Black, and sometimes he reminds me of Anthony Hopkins, and then there’s a third person that I’d swear he was a spitting image of but I can’t think of it now. But they’re great shows, and he seems so genuinely excited about it all which is I think why it works.
And here all the sudden they’re naming prehistoric fish “showing unexpected features similar to early land animals” after him.
June 26th, 2008 at 9:26 am
David Attenborough’s been on the telly for as long as I can remember and that’s a long long time. Back in the Sixties he was the guy one told grown-ups was your favourite person on the telly, when of course one’s real favourite was the wonderful Top Cat.
Interesting the way that over the years he’s gone from being quite dispassionate and scientific, with only the occasional “isn’t Nature wonderful!” moment, to nowadays giving animals all sorts of family back-story and anthropomorphising like crazy. Still, he’s not totally dumbed-down, and the moment with the cave full of bats (and guano) was most entertaining if you like that sort of thing. Pity he endorsed global warming. Wonder whether that had anything to do with him getting another series?
June 26th, 2008 at 11:14 am
If you’re talking about the bit about the bats I’m thinking about (and which Peter did an exquisitely hilarious mime of), then that was truly hilarious, but not nearly as good as the one bird in Canada, I think, who after a brief liaison with a male of the species, “Has to pull herself together and prepare for a life as a single mother.” Hilarious!