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West Indian Ocean Coelacanth
A coelacanth’s paired fins extend from fleshy bases, a feature shared with fossil lobe-finned fish. The group is known from fossils hundreds of millions of years old. A living fish caught off South Africa in 1938 showed that one branch survived, and scientists later described a different living species near Indonesia.
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Atlantic horseshoe crab
The domed shield, movable rear section, and long tail spine give this animal an outline recognizable in some of its fossil relatives. Maryland’s fossil timeline also shows early relatives with quite different shapes. The Atlantic species is one of four living horseshoe crabs.
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Tuatara
A tuatara looks a little like a lizard. Its order, the rhynchocephalians, includes many fossil species from the dinosaur era and only the tuatara survives today. Follow the row of spines along its back and compare its outline with a lizard. Close resemblance can hide a different branch of the reptile family tree.
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Chambered nautilus
The animal lives in the newest and largest chamber of its coiled shell. Earlier chambers help regulate its buoyancy. Fossils preserve the walls between chambers and traces of the tube that connects them, features that reveal how a similar sort of shell worked in ancient cephalopods.
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Frilled shark
This deepwater shark has an eel-shaped body, rows of narrow teeth, and six pairs of gill openings. Frilled shark relatives turn up in the fossil record mainly as teeth. Those remains let paleontologists compare the teeth of extinct sharks with living ones even when soft parts and cartilage are missing.
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Australian lungfish
Look at the broad fins and the fish’s thick scales. The Australian lungfish has gills and can also breathe air with a single lung. Fossils trace the wider lungfish lineage back to the Devonian, giving you a window into an era when lobe-finned fishes had far more branches than they do today.
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Peripatoides novaezealandiae
This New Zealand velvet worm walks on rows of short, soft legs. Cambrian fossils preserve legged animals that help explain the deep history of its wider group. Living velvet worms are diverse, and the fossil resemblance is easiest to see in the way the legs are arranged along the body.
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Triops cancriformis
The broad shield, many limbs, and paired tail filaments give this tadpole shrimp a recognizable silhouette. A fossil that looks similar can be difficult to assign to a living species. Scientists have reconsidered the identity of Triassic specimens once assigned to this one, a good example of what an ancient body shape can and cannot tell you.
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American paddlefish
The long, flattened snout is the first feature to look for. The wider paddlefish family has a fossil record stretching back into the Cretaceous, and some fossil relatives also had paddle-shaped snouts. The American paddlefish is the family’s sole surviving species.
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Alligator gar
The interlocking, diamond-shaped scales give a gar much of its familiar armor. Hard scales also survive in fossils, where they help identify members of the lineage long after the rest of the fish is gone. The alligator gar also shows the long jaws typical of the group.
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Crinoid
A living crinoid’s featherlike arms collect food from passing water. The same branching arrangement can show up in fossils. Many fossil crinoids lived attached to the seabed by a stalk. The feather star pictured here lacks a permanent stalk and can move to another spot.
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Lingula anatina
This brachiopod can anchor in soft sediment with a stalk between its valves. Its shell shape resembles specimens from some very old branches of the brachiopod family tree. Shells and their attachment features give fossil researchers something to compare even when there is no trace of the feeding apparatus inside.
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