A 435-million-year-old fossil discovered in Connemara by an Irish geologist has been confirmed as a new species and the oldest of its type in Ireland.
The thumbnail-sized ophiuroid, or brittlestar, has also been named after the man who found it, Dr Eamon Doyle, in a rare honour for an Irish scientist.
The newly analysed brittlestar, a type of marine animal closely related to the starfish, is a species with super survival powers, Dr Doyle noted. Its relatives lived with little change through continents colliding, oceans opening and closing, and the extinction of the dinosaurs.
The specimen that he found in the Maam Valley scavenged for a living at a time when Ireland was farther south and split over two continents separated by the Iapetus Ocean, which predated the Atlantic.
This brittlestar is one of a species that evolved 500 million years ago and dates from the Silurian period, when the first true fish and land plants appeared. It lost its marine environment about 400 million years ago.
It has been given the Latin name Crepidosoma doyleii by international palaeontologists in the latest issue of the Irish Journal of Earth Sciences, published by the Royal Irish Academy.=read more
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