Oldest Live Birth Captured In Fish Fossil

A fossil fish, estimated at 380 million years old, has been discovered in the act of giving birth. The fish and her offspring died while still connected by an umbilical cord.

Dubbed “mother fish” by the scientists who discovered her in northwestern Australia, Materpiscis attenboroughi is not only an entirely new genus and species, but pushes back the first known case of live birth in the animal kingdom by some 200 million years.

The discovery is also the earliest evidence so far of internal fertilization, or sex with penetration. Other fish species from the Middle Palaeozoic Era laid eggs.

Source: Discovery