Ancient Sea Creature Resembled a Cigar

Posted on June 27, 2013

LiveScience reports that several fossils of a 520-million-year-old cigar-shaped sea creature have been discovered. The spiral-plated echinoderm, Helicocystis moroccoensis, is from the early Cambrian. Echinoderm is a phylum of marine animals that includes starfish, sand dollars and sea urchins. The fossils were found in the Anti-Atlas Mountains in Morocco.

Andrew Smith, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, told LiveScience, "It's a cigar-shaped beast, and it was able to expand and contract that cigar shape. Sometimes it could be short and fat, and sometimes it could be long and thin."

The primitive echinoderm was described in a research paper in the journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

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