New species from proto-Baltic Sea 450 million years ago

A picture of a tiny, 2-millimeter-long fossil is on the cover of the March 2024 issue of Palaeworld. International scientists led by Tartu University paleobiologist Olev Vinn made a remarkable discovery of new species of marine animals that adapted to life in muddy shallow waters of the Baltic Sea's predecessor.

The study discovered two new cornulitid species – a genus of tiny tubeworms abundant in the world's oceans at the time – that had evolved from their larger relatives living on hard ocean substrates to thrive in the new environment: the shallow, muddy seafloor of the Baltica paleobasin.

Vinn has been studying Ordovician (485-443 million years ago) cornulitids from Estonia for decades and has published extensively on them, but he still believes more research is needed to understand the diversity and ecology of this mysterious group.

Cornulitids as primitive tentaculitoid tubworms are difficult to categorize as they went extinct, leaving no living descendants to study.

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