A female geologist past on the attached which came from the CBC's website. Adds a new meaning to "coming out of your shell!"
Oldest male fossil 'amazing'
Last Updated Fri, 05 Dec 2003 10:16:19
LEICESTER, UNITED KINGDOM - British researchers say the remains of a small sea creature extracted from a 425-million-year-old rock is the oldest male fossil known. The creature was a distant relative of lobsters and shrimp.
It was found in Herefordshire, United Kingdom, where it was buried under volcanic ash. The ash mineralized the remains, retaining an image of its soft body parts. Geology Prof. David Siveter of the University of Leicester and his colleagues were able to take thin shavings from the well-preserved remains, which they scanned into a computer. They then electronically constructed a three-dimensional version of the shelled creature and determined its sex.
They found it had six pairs of gills, eyes, limbs designed for swimming and the oldest known male organ in the fossil record. It was named Colymbosathon ecplecticos, which is Greek for "amazing swimmer with large penis."
Modern relatives of C. ecplecticos are found in the Earth's deep oceans and shallow streams. They are crustaceans with two shells that tend to graze on dead organic matter. At its widest, the specimen was about five centimetres across and its soft body parts inside the shell resembled the creature's modern cousins like shrimp. It lived in marine waters at a depth of 150 to 200 metres, the researchers wrote in Friday's issue of the journal Science.