Previously extinct species from 30,000 years ago has been found alive

It's a crazy rediscovery. An article published in the scientific magazine Zoo Keysproves the sighting of Cymatioa cooki. No, this is not an underwater cookie, but a species of mollusc that is between 28,000 and 36,000 years old. A video published on Sat1 shows the course of events, based on the publications in Zoo Keys.

Off the coast of Santa Barbara

The finder of this mere 10-millimetre-long bivalve mollusc is Jeffrey H. R. Goddard, marine ecologist at the University of California Santa Barbara and second author of the study alongside Paul Valentich-Scott.

The habitat where Goddard comes across the mussel is a very carefully studied area - the rocky intertidal zone in southern and central California. The researcher, who knows the zone like the back of his hand, comes across the species believed dead under the rocks at NaplesPoint.

Reference from 1937

As they did not recognise the shell they had found, Valentich-Scott searched through the literature of the last 250 years - and stumbled across a description from 1937. At that time, the researcher G. Willet had catalogued fossils of invertebrate molluscs as well as vertebrates from the Pleistocene period.

Willet's description of the species Bornia cooki agrees with the Cymatioa cooki that has now been found alive. Thus, the now-renamed species is a sensational find! After all, it's not every day that science finds the living ancestors of fossils thousands of years old.

This article was translated from Gentside DE.

Sources used:

-zookeys.pensoft.net: A fossil species found living off southern California, with notes on the genus Cymatioa (Mollusca, Bivalvia, Galeommatoidea)

-sat1.de: Unfassbarer Fund: Seit 30.000 Jahren ausgestorbene Spezies taucht plötzlich wieder auf