450 million years old, still soft tissue inside

Scientists just found soft tissue preserved inside a fossil older than the first dinosaur by more than 200 million years, and researchers are calling it one in a million.

The fossil belongs to a species called Dendrocrinus simcoensis, a crinoid dug up in Québec, Canada, and dated to roughly 452 million years old. Crinoids have a fossil record stretching back nearly 485 million years, but soft tissue like this has surfaced in it only once before. This is just the second documented case ever, and it's now the oldest known example of soft-tissue preservation in a crinoid.

What survived is remarkable: the fossil's tube feet, delicate appendages replicated in pyrite before they could fully decay. The mineral took their shape and held it. That's the "one in a million" part: not a figure of speech, but a literal description of the odds.

The age is its own kind of astonishing, too. At roughly 452 million years old, this specimen predates the first dinosaurs, which didn't show up until about 230 million years ago, by more than 200 million years. Whatever was happening on Earth when this creature died, dinosaurs weren't remotely on the horizon yet.

The research comes from Selina Cole, David Wright, William Ausich, and Mario Cournoyer, published in Royal Society Open Science. Cole and Wright are paleontologists at the University of Oklahoma and the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, and the specimen itself is held at the Musée de paléontologie et de l'évolution in Montréal.

Soft tissue this old shouldn't exist. And yet, for one crinoid in one lucky moment 452 million years ago, it does.