Podcast 301 - You Little Punk

The gang discusses two papers that look at some exceptional soft-tissue preservation during the Silurian. The first paper potentially identifies a unique type of pterobranch, and the second paper looks at some early molluscs. Meanwhile, James has seen some movies, Amanda has a skibidi day, and Curt's soul dies.   Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition): The friends talk about two animals from a long time ago that are only found as soft parts and that makes it hard to find the parts of them that were in the ground a long long time ago. The first paper looks at an animal that is not well known in the past but is close to another animal that is better known. These soft parts are weird and people did not know what they were for a long while. This paper makes the case for this being one of this group of animals that all live in long empty round things together. They also say that this one may have lived moving in the water even though the ones today all sit at the bottom of the water on the ground. The second paper looks at another group of animals that many today have a hard part on them and some of them turn their body when they grow. The animals that they are looking at do not do these things. They have hair and are long. These are animals are from a group that we think might be close to what the early animals in this group today would have looked like. The friends talk about this paper because they gave the animals funny names.   References: Briggs, Derek EG, and Nicolás Mongiardino Koch. "A Silurian pseudocolonial pterobranch." Current Biology 33.23 (2023): 5225-5232. Sutton, Mark D., et al. "New Silurian aculiferan fossils reveal complex early history of Mollusca." Nature (2025): 1-6.