Two species of marine molluscs dating back about 430 million years have been named Punk and Emo for their outlandish spiky appearance
By Chris Simms
8 January 2025
Digital models of the ancient molluscs Punk ferox and Emo vorticaudum, created from X-ray scans of their fossils
Sutton et al. Nature (2025)
Fossils of two prehistoric marine molluscs with distinctive spiky “hairstyles” have been discovered and named Punk and Emo.
Their strange appearance highlights the ancient diversity of molluscs – which nowadays include organisms like snails, slugs, clams and octopuses.
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“Some people may be a bit down on molluscs. My partner called them loser animals. But they’re one of the really major branches of life,” says Mark Sutton at Imperial College London.
He and his colleagues unearthed the finds, which date back 430 million years, at a UK site known as the Herefordshire Lagerstätte.
The fossils, from a group of molluscs known as Aculifera, were so delicate that the researchers couldn’t just crack open the stone that contained them because that would destroy their fragile forms.