Prehistoric Fish Hailed with Inventing Sex
Updated : Feb 26, 2009
Apparently sex has been around longer than we thought. New research published in the journal Nature has revealed that prehistoric fish on ancient tropical coral reefs were doing it too. The discovery sheds new light on the reproductive history of all “jawed vertebrates, including humans“.
Sex and internal fertilisation has been around for at least 380m years, longer than previously thought.
'It shifts how we think about how reproduction evolved. You're a jawed vertebrate and I'm a jawed vertebrate, so this is our own history,' said Zerina Johanson, a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in London.
The fish fossils were unearthed in Australia, and have helped Ms Johanson and her colleagues deduce that copulation was common among armoured placoderms, extinct shark-like species, after finding embryos inside them. Initially the tiny embryo was mistaken as being a last meal as finding fossil evidence of reproduction is rare
VeryHappyPig says thank you so much, prehistoric fishy!
