These 80 million year old sea creatures look remarkably like Buckyballs

Life at the bottom of the ocean 80 million years ago was difficult. The sea level was shallow, the predators were always on the prowl and there was always another slimy, pointed, hard-shelled creature ready to steal your spot.

To survive, the sea urchin's former parents reformed its anatomy to become dead rings for robust carbon organic molecules, known as buckyballs. It wasn't just a solid choice either: it was his mathematical fate.

Fossils representing two species of primitive echinoderms of the Upper Cretaceous reveal that the arrangements of their protective plates, called chalice, were geometrically similar to the polygons of the carbon spheres.

The comparison of the underlying rules responsible for structures allows us to understand how the forms of the animal body could have diversified in response to environmental pressures, explain the researchers in a new study.

To find clues to the types of restrictions that ancient animals faced in their adaptability, a team from the University of Western Australia (UWA) and the University of Cambridge used techniques special graphics to quantify structural designs of Uintacrinus socialis

and Marsupites testudinarius, which belonged to a class of echinoderms called crinoids.

Some models would have created less stable forms, while others simply would not have been possible. The networking of the calyx topology, or geometric arrangements, helps researchers better understand the path to follow, or even to retreat, in natural selection.

"Survival was critical and ball-shaped structures, capable of withstanding very heavy loads, formed around them to protect them from ocean damage and to promote buoyancy." He says UWA evolutionary paleoecologist Aaron Hunter.

At first glance, many crinoids can easily be mistaken for plants, with leafy appendages waving in ocean currents and a rod that anchors their calyx to the seabed.

These two examples of the Cretaceous opposed this tendency, abandoning the stem entirely to settle in the soft dust of calcareous soil, or to go up in the currents to seek less perfidious herbs.

Uintacrinus sp. with its network structure. (Cuthill and Hunter, Paleontology2020)

"These animals could spread all over the world and have been found in chalk rocks from Texas, from the United States to Kalbarri in Western Australia." He says Hunter.

"They could form a racket to sit at the bottom of the shallow oceans or float and move to safer places."

Their almost spherical calyxes were also more or less alike. Marsupitas he had 16 large plates, five or six sides in a soccer ball type arrangement, compared to Uintacrinus many small, comprising of four to eight sides each.

These arrangements, scientists have discovered, have not only remembered carbon nanostructures. They were mathematically a match, with Marsupitas

It looks like an enlarged version of a spherical molecule made up of 30 carbon atoms.

The most famous example of carbon spheres like this is the buckminsterfullerene, after 20^e American inventor and architect of the century, More complete buckminster.

Its geodesic dome design, made in famous structures such as the massive one Eden Project in Cornwall, United Kingdom: he combined the strength of these polygonal arrangements with a modernist aesthetic.

However, it appears that Fuller has been defeated for around 80 million years.

"The structures are also found in the buckminsterfullerene carbon molecule, but this is the first time that we find such a structure in fossils." He says Hunter.

"It remains a mystery why these successful structures have not evolved again."

The question of why it is a rare form in nature, given its potential to resist the bite of a predator, depends largely on the ease with which it can appear in the first place.

The conditions of Uintacrinus and Marsupitas they overlapped for about a million years, when the dinosaurs were still wandering.

The period was also at the end of an era who has seen new types of predators evolve, smash shells, sink hard-shelled creatures deep into the ocean.

By analyzing the topological arrangements of these plates as a network, the researchers were able to compare these structures with all the possible forms available, helping to better understand how their evolution could have occurred.

It turns out that for the crinoid MarsupitasA stable buckyball structure was on the cards, with graphical models showing limited routes to other possible body planes.

Uintacrinus He was not so lucky. His own design was a good try, but these smaller, more uneven plates wouldn't have provided the same stiffness.

This type of body shape mapping has been applied in other areas of biology, but it remains a tool with a lot of unrealized potential to understand why certain evolutionary branches develop, while others decompose. .

Evolution can often seem like a wild bet. But in many cases, the cards are very stacked.