14 nov 2011
The newly described species, a primitive cephalopod, comes pretty close in time to the world's oldest known meat eaters.
Paleobiologist Martin Smith, who worked on the Nectocaris research, told me, "The earliest evidence for predation in the fossil record comes in the form of microscopic bore-holes in the calcified tube of the Ediacaran worm Cloudina, some fifty million years before Nectocaris."
"No known fossil animals can be implicated in this predation, probably because they lacked any easily-fossilized hard parts,"
