Nick
Garland
Founder and Editor
A strange, small cone-shaped fossil baffled scientists for a very long time. Now that it has found its family, you’ll never guess its closest living relative.
Conularia are some of the most enigmatic fossils ever found. They are not very common globally, but locally in places like Texas and Kentucky they are found in high concentrations.
Their fossils are generally small, four-sided and cone-shaped with series of grooves running side-to-side. Paleontologists think that the pointed end of the cone was attached to the seafloor and the wide end was generally open, but sometimes had four “hatches,” with tentacles emerging from the opening.
Most scientists who have studied the fossils agree that the four-fold symmetry of conularia indicate that they are scyphozoan cnidarians, meaning their closest living relatives are the jellyfish. Strange, but probably true.