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back to article Ancient tulip-like stomach-onna-stick creatures found in Rockies

Fossil-boffins probing into the remains of a soft-bodied tulip animal that lived in the Rockies 500 million years ago have just published a paper revealing the secrets of the weird creature. Essentially stomachs on stalks, the tulip-shaped creatures known as Siphusauctum gregarium lived in great herds and are the most commonly …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    You couldn't make this stuff up

    But Barrington J. Bayley could - and did.

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  2. Audrey S. Thackeray

    Think I've seen some of these clustered around Gregg's.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Pint

      First decent laugh on Friday and it isn't even close to beer O'clock

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  3. Rameses Niblick the Third (KKWWMT)

    "terminal anus"

    Brilliant term. I can think of a few people I'd describe as such, too.

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  4. ravenviz Silver badge
    Childcatcher

    Heh!

    She said anus.

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  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    huh?

    Waving anus-tipped flowers...

    Thousands of these appear on 4chan every day. Or so I hear.

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  6. Chris Seiter
    Coat

    Model for future organizations

    "an ovoid lower tract near the base of the calyx, grading into a bulbous mid-gut, then tapering into a straight and thin upper intestine projecting upwards to a central terminal anus"

    Sounds a lot like government.

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  7. No, I will not fix your computer
    Joke

    This article is a load of arse.

    Nuff said.

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  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The early Cambrian must have been like some sort of ITV game show 'tonight only one family will be going through into the Ordovician, the others will be turned into coal. We asked 100 trilobites...'

    Superficially it has some similarities to Crinoids which pop up in the Ordovician and were largely extinctified in the Permian. But this is a bilaterally symmetric beastie whereas crinoids (like other echinoderms) have five-fold symmetry.

    The fossils in the article are amazing. I'd love to have one - but not quite as much as I'd like a tyrannosaur in the living room...

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    1. ravenviz Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Coat

      ...with lasers on its head?

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    2. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      ARGonauts .... Angels on Holy Grail Missions

      " But this is a bilaterally symmetric beastie whereas crinoids (like other echinoderms) have five-fold symmetry." ..... Mike Richards Friday 20th January 2012 14:52 GMT

      Five-fold symmetry with a bilaterally asymmetric beastie is an altogether different Great Game, MR.

      Being devilishly good at being oneself is a revelation and instant tonic relief. A secret to nurture to the grave and deliver to the future.

      1 1
      1. BorkedAgain
        Reply Icon
        Thumb Up

        Marvin?

        Missed you, man! Where you been?

        0 1
  9. Bango Skank
    Thumb Up

    Anus on a stick, the ancestral origin of the politician

    nuff said

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  10. Joe User

    Stomach-onna-stick

    Is that the new haggis take-away shop in Glasgow?

    6 0
    1. Fractured Cell
      Reply Icon

      Only if C.M.O.T. Dibbler exsists in MeatSpace.

      0 0
    2. Mips
      Reply Icon
      Childcatcher

      So..

      ..fossil botherers read Pratchett then.

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  11. John A Blackley

    If it's soft bodied and its internals are mainly guts, how did the fossil get made?

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    1. LaeMing
      Reply Icon

      Soft tissues rarely fossilise, but in rare and ideal conditions, they can.

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    2. AJ MacLeod
      Reply Icon

      Yes, interesting point... at university we were told by our geology lecturer (and not all that long ago, either) that no soft-bodied creatures were preserved in the fossil record.

      Not only is this (obviously) untrue, they're not even rare in the fossil record! The problem is, most people working in this field are indoctrinated to believe that the fossil record represents millions of years of slow and gradual deposition when in fact it's very clear from any rational examination of the evidence that this is not true; the fossil record is evidence of watery destruction on a catastrophic worldwide scale, everything swept away or buried in massive layers of rapidly-deposited silt.

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      1. Jim Carter
        Reply Icon

        A mixture of both, really.

        A combination of the catastrophic (cf. the KT Impact, Burgess Shale etc.) and the gradual, such as various Ice Ages, the slow deposition of ocean sediment, mountain building and so forth.

        Although the film Ice Age is and remains a bloody catastrophe if you ask me.

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      2. BorkedAgain
        Reply Icon
        WTF?

        @AJ

        Hang on, are you telling me my Christian Fundamentalist school friend was correct, and the fossil record is actual, scientific evidence of the biblical flood? Yikes, I owe someone an apology...

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  12. Robert E A Harvey
    Pint

    Burgess Shale

    If the creationists are right and fossils were planted by God to test our faith/as a joke/whatever, the angels who did the Burgess Shale designs must have been drinking something no longer available. Nearly everything in there is horror-movie weird

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  13. Charles Manning
    Facepalm

    What's the big deal?

    These things still exist and fields of them are seen every day by recreational divers.

    I've seen lots of them off the South African coast around Cape Town. No doubt they exist elsewhere too.

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  14. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    Could we keep this secret from Japan?

    Their tentacle approach is disturbing enough, thanks ;-)

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  15. perlcat
    Coat

    Will no one ask the obvious?

    Playmobil reconstruction, please.

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