Forgotten fossil in museum drawer challenges what we know about animal evolution

The world’s greatest fossil sites have one thing in common: someone went looking for them. Paleontologists choose formations that already have a track record, dig in sediments that have yielded soft-bodied animals before, and build careers around places that reward the effort. A specimen in the Smithsonian’s collections quietly upended that logic. Nobody went looking for it. The fossil sat in a museum drawer for more than 60 years, collected in 1962 and largely ignored – until a researcher finally looked.

Forgotten fossil in museum drawer challenges what we know about animal evolution. The world’s greatest fossil sites have one thing in common: someone went looking for them. Paleontologists choose formations that already have a track record, dig in sediments that have yielded soft-bodied animals before, and build careers around places that reward the effort. A specimen in the Smithsonian’s collections quietly upended that logic. Nobody went looking for it. The fossil sat in a museum drawer for more than 60 years, collected in 1962 and largely ignored – until a researcher finally looked. A familiar quiet stretch Paleontologists have long run into the same problem with a specific window in time covering roughly 497 million to 485 million years ago, near the close of the Cambrian Period. Known as the Furongian gap, it reads like a dip in the...