Saccorhytus
Saccorhytus (from Latin saccus "bag" and Ancient Greek ῥύτις rhytis "wrinkle") is an extinct genus of animal possibly belonging to the superphylum Ecdysozoa, and it is represented by a single species, Saccorhytus coronarius (from Latin attributive coronarius "[of a] crown"). The organism lived approximately 540 million years ago in the beginning of the Cambrian period. Initially proposed as a deuterostome, which would have made it the oldest known species of this superphylum, it has since been determined to belong to a protostome group called the ecdysozoans.
Article
4 sectionsContents
- Description
- Phylogeny
- Palaeoecology
- References
Saccorhytus (from Latin saccus "bag" and Ancient Greek ῥύτις rhytis "wrinkle") is an extinct genus of animal possibly belonging to the superphylum Ecdysozoa, and it is represented by a single species, Saccorhytus coronarius (from Latin attributive coronarius "[of a] crown"). The organism lived approximately 540 million years ago in the beginning of the Cambrian period. Initially proposed as a deuterostome, which would have made it the oldest known species of this superphylum, it has since been determined to belong to a protostome group called the ecdysozoans.
Fossils of the species were first discovered in the Kuanchuanpu Formation of Shaanxi province of China by a team of scientists from the United Kingdom, China and Germany, and the findings were first published in January 2017.