Science News, November 16th, 1996
Looking something like a tiny squashed eel, a newfound fossil from southwest China will not win any beauty contests. Yet this 530-million-year-old specimen from Earth's Cambrian period holds a special allure for paleontologists. It may be the oldest known chordate, the phylum to which humans and all other vertebrates belong.
"We've managed to push the story back considerably," says Simon Conway Morris, a paleontologist at the University of Cambridge in England, who collaborated with D.-G. Shu and X.-L. Zhang at Northwest University in Xian, China. They describe the 2.2-centimeter-long anima...
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