February 1, 2010 -"It's smelly work," says Mark Purnell of the Geology Department at the University of Leicester in UK. Dr. Purnell and his colleagues have been studying rotting fish in an effort to understand what 500 million year old fossils might have looked like as living creatures. Bones can take decades to decay, but soft features, such as eyes, gills and organs, can disappear in a matter of months, weeks and even days. So, the researchers thought that a little CSI-style forensic analysis could flesh out what fossilized creatures might actually have looked like when they were alive half a billion years ago. Purnell and his team found that features disappeared in a distinctive pattern. Some parts, such as the gut and liver, lasted for 130 days, eyes were gone after 64 days and the multichambered heart after only about 11. One conclusion of the study is that early life forms were more complex than previously thought. Here's the full story from Scientific American.
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