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Amazing discovery inside “living fossil”

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65-million-year-old fossil of a Coelacanth
Photo by Haplochromis [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
Researchers studying the Coelacanth, a mysterious living fossil, discover something amazing.

Thought extinct, the deep-ocean-dwelling creature was found alive and well when fishermen caught one in 1938. The bizarre fish has a number of unusual qualities. It has matching pairs of lobe fins that stick out like legs and even move like the legs of a four-legged animal. It has a hinged skull which can widen it’s mouth to eat larger prey. It has an electrosensory organ in it’s snout that may help it hunt.

Now we find that it once had lungs!

Photo of a diver swimming with a Coelacanth
Living fossil swims with a diver
Photo by Mordecai 1998 [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons
An article in Discover News tells how researchers exploring the body of a Coelacanth have found what appears to be an obsolete lung. Humans have an appendix, an organ that seems to serve no real purpose for us, but might have been important long ago. Similarly, it appears that this fish may have once used lungs to breath air and that the organ has faded back over time.

This suggests that the Coelacanth was once an air-breather that evolved to become a creature of the deep. This may be what saved this species while other creatures of the period were wiped out, possibly by a single event.

Earth’s history is a  strange array of creatures, and discoveries like this just fuel the imagination. Will we ever get a clear picture of it all without a time machine? Perhaps not. However, each clue shows us that it was all weirder than we thought. Weird is good!

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PREHISTORIC MACHINERY DISCOVERED IN RUSSIA

Let’s take a brief look back 300 million years into Earth’s history. Just what was happening at this volatile juncture in time? The planet was dominated by a single supercontinent known as Pangaea amidst the massive ocean known as Panthalassa. Deserts covered the majority of the interior of the continent where the first reptiles began to rise to dominance. The Permian Era saw the evolution of amniotes into the first groups of mammals, turtles, lepidosaurs and archosaurs. Hardly the time one would picture ancient machinery being constructed by an alien race. However, according to the Voice of Russia and other sources this was a time when some of our cosmic cousins just may have set up residence within the primordial chaos of prehistoric Earth.

Sections of an aluminum gear rail found near Vladivostok are now believed to have been manufactured by a possible ancient alien civilization. A resident discovered the artifact when the light of his fire revealed the outline of what appeared to be a piece of machinery in a clump of coal he was about to use to heat his home. Convinced that what he possessed was more than merely a naturally occurring coincidence the man sought out the professional opinions of scientists located in the Primorey region of Russia. After lengthy analysis by said scientists, it was determined that the approximate age of the artifact is 300 million years. This is an assumption, however, due to the fact that the coal being used by the man was delivered to the Primorey area from the Chernogorodskiy mines of Khakasia region of the same age. It is not specified as to whether or not this artifact has been carbon-dated—as to what tests exactly were run on the gear rail, it is also not revealed.

The discovery of such artifacts is surprisingly not that uncommon. In 1851 workers removed a zinc and silver vase embedded in a block of coal. This vase was carbon-dated and estimated to be nearly 500 million years in age. Six decades after the initial discovery scientists in Oklahoma extracted an iron pot, also embedded in coal, which they later determined to be 312 million years old. The most recent artifact, before the current Russian gear rail, was in 1974—an aluminum “assembly part” was found within a sandstone quarry in Romania. The item was said to resemble either a hammer or the leg of an unknown spacecraft, such as that used in Earth’s own “Apollo”, and was dated to be from the Jurassic era. Can we say Aliens meets Jurassic Park?

Natalia Ostrowski at the KP UA Daily stated that the Russian machine part holds similarities in its design to that of modern microscopes and various technical and electronic devices. Currently, the theory that this new item is evidence of ancient alien inhabitants is based largely on the presence of magnesium-26. Aluminum-26, which is an off-world element found only in meteorites, breaks down into magnesium-26 over time as it interacts with Earth’s atmosphere. This points to either the gear itself having been manufactured elsewhere in the universe or that it was the product of alloy brought to Earth millions of years ago from another world.

Analysis of the Russian gear rail continues as world experts search for the truth behind its origins. Look for our updates as news surfaces!

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