Meet Punk and Emo, Two Angsty-Looking Fossils From 430 Million Years Ago That Shed Light on Early Mollusk Evolution

Move aside Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance—two new rockstars have just entered the punk and emo scene.

Meet Punk ferox and Emo vorticaudum, two newly revealed fossils rocking scientists’ previously held theories about a group of ancient mollusks. The pair of more than 430-million-year-old creatures, described in the journal Nature last week, suggests these long-extinct species are not as primitive as paleontologists once thought.

“The names Punk and Emo were actually our initial pet names for these ancient mollusks, inspired by some of their unique features and individuality,” Mark Sutton, a paleontologist at Imperial College London who led the study, explains in a statement. “Punk in particular, with its spiky appearance, clearly resembles a rebellious punk rocker—and we thought Emo complemented it well.”

Mollusks are the second largest animal phylum in the world, behind only Arthropods (a group that includes insects, spiders and crustaceans). Scientists suggest the Earth might host up to 200,000 species of mollusks. But this vast array boils down to two main groups: the conchiferans, which includes animals like snails, clams and octopuses, and the aculiferans, a “weird and wacky group of spiny things” including “obscure, weird molluscan worms,” as Sutton tells the New York Times’ Kate Golembiewski.

Punk and Emo fall into the latter class—and they certainly are “weird” and “spiny.” Both Punk and Emo are described as worm-like mollusks with long spines and smooth undersides that suggest they inhabited the seafloor. Punk had gills and a broad foot with ridges on the bottom, making it stand out from living species. Emo, meanwhile, had two small shells and a compressed body. Specifically, Sutton found Punk’s spikes to closely resemble classic punk hairstyles, and he thought Emo’s more downward-pointing spines call to mind emo bangs, per the New York Times.

While scientists are still unsure how Punk would have moved, they discovered Emo in a folded posture that hints to an inchworm-like locomotion, perhaps aided by its spines. However, “the spikes are probably mostly protective,” Sutton tells New Scientist’s Chris Simms, though he adds that they could have formed to rid the animal’s body of accumulated calcium—and both explanations could be true. The mollusks were small, at about 0.79 inches long.

Aculiferans like Punk and Emo were “long considered to be much more limited in form” than the more familiar mollusks, as Derek Briggs, a paleontologist at Yale University and a co-author of the study, says in a statement. Now, these stunning fossils show their group was “remarkably diverse in the distant past, compared to the present day,” he adds.

Briggs and his colleagues discovered Punk and Emo preserved in 3D within stones from a site known as the Herefordshire Lagerstätte in the United Kingdom, which dates back to the middle of the Silurian period (about 420 million to 443 million years ago). The fossils were so fragile that the scientists couldn’t simply split the stones in half, and their density was so similar to the surrounding rock that even CT scans wouldn’t have offered a clear picture of the animals. Instead, they sliced the fossils up by hand and took a picture of each tiny section.

“We grind away a slice at a time, take a photo, repeat at 20-micron intervals or so,” explains Sutton to the New York Times. Though this means the fossils were destroyed—turned to dust by the end of the process—the scientists were able to combine the images into detailed 3D representations of the mollusks.

“I really like the names, and they definitely fit the bill for these spiky mollusks,” Luke Parry, a paleontologist at the University of Oxford in England who was not involved in the study, tells New Scientist. “Fossil mollusks that preserve soft tissues like this are incredibly rare, and so seeing what these unusual ancient animals looked like in 3D is just spectacular. This site in Herefordshire appears to be a treasure trove, like a wormy mollusk Pompeii.”

Margherita Bassi | READ MORE

Margherita Bassi is a freelance journalist and trilingual storyteller. Her work has appeared in publications including BBC Travel, Discover magazine, Live Science, Atlas Obscura and Hidden Compass.