This 480 million-year-old creature is the ancestor of all starfish - Livescience.com

A strange little fossil may represent the ancestor of all starfish-like animals on the planet, according to a new study. .

The new species, Cantabrigiaster fezouataensis, is shaped like a star but lacks other distinguishing features seen in either of the two starfish-like animals alive today: starfish and brittle stars (part of a subphylum called Asterozoa).

Because the species lacked these features — the long thin arms of the brittle star and the chunky armor plates around a starfish — researchers concluded it was, therefore, the ancestor of both. .

"We've discovered exactly how the first starfish-like animal appeared and then how it evolved into those two ones which we have today, which are almost everywhere in the sea," said study lead author Aaron Hunter, a paleontologist in the Earth sciences department at the University of Cambridge.

"You're dealing with what was perhaps closer to what we think of being Antarctica today," Hunter told Live Science. .

The ancestor lived during the early Ordovician period (about 485.4 million to 460 million years ago) on what would have been an ancient cold-water reef, surrounded by mostly alien-looking species such as giant filter feeders called anomalocarididsC

"It's when life really got going in terms of being diverse, and that starfish is one of the first animals that we'd recognize today in the sea," Hunter said. .

fezouataensis as a starting point, it is now possible to link starfish-like animals from about 480 million years ago to more recent fossils and then to present-day animals. 

"This new early starfish from Morocco provides interesting glimpses on early asterozoan evolution and the origin of the echinoderm crown-group," the larger group that includes starfish and brittle stars, as well as sea urchins, sea lilies and sea cucumbers, Lefebvre said. 

But more research is needed, especially on animals of the late Cambrian period (497 million to 485.4 million years ago), to fill the gap between the earliest echinoderms and all five of the groups we see today, Lefebvre said.