The Grand Canyon is known as a world-renowned tourist destination for its breathtaking vistas and outdoor adventures. But within the striated canyon walls, a hidden world of microscopic marvels reveals the region’s role as an evolutionary hotbed teeming with prehistoric life.
In a study published in July, researchers from the University of Cambridge announced a first-of-its-kind discovery of thousands of microscopic fossils from the Cambrian period unearthed from the Grand Canyon’s walls.
Researchers collected rock samples from the interior of the Grand Canyon during a 2023 expedition. The rocks were brought back to their Cambridge lab, where they were dissolved with acid and viewed under high-powered microscopes.
One fist-sized rock held over a thousand microscopic fossils, including soft-bodied animals that are rarely fossilized.
The unique prehistoric conditions of the Grand Canyon created the perfect environment for animal life and fossil preservation, capturing an important period of evolutionary history when life on Earth was developing all kinds of weird and wonderful traits.
Known as the Cambrian Explosion, this prehistoric time period occurred around half a billion years ago, when animal life experienced a relatively rapid diversification through evolution. Before this period, most of the world’s ecosystems were populated by microorganisms, but during this evolutionary explosion, the fossil record begins to show plants and animals that are more recognizable.
A newly discovered species of priapulids was widespread during the Cambrian but is nearly extinct today. Researchers named this new animal discovered in the Grand Canyon Kraytdraco spectatus, after the krayt dragon, a fictional creature from the “Star Wars” universe.
The area of the modern-day Canyon was once a prehistoric shoreline, described by researchers as a “Goldilocks Zone,” where warm, oxygen-rich underwater conditions were perfect for an evolutionary boom.
The Grand Canyon, as we know it, would be carved out by the Colorado River hundreds of millions of years later.
“In the middle of the canyon, there was this pretty sweet spot for animal life to become established for a relatively long time and for it to elaborate upon itself in this resource-rich environment,” said Giovanni Mussini, a Cambridge paleontologist who collected rock samples during the expedition and lead author of the study.
A trove of exceptionally preserved early animals from more than half a billion years ago has been discovered in the Grand Canyon, one of the natural world’s most iconic sites.
“I think the Grand Canyon is the perfect combination of Paleo-environment and accessibility of the rocks that record them.”
Among the new discoveries was a species of priapulid, also known as a penis worm or cactus worm, with a long retractable mouth lined with hundreds of spiky teeth. This type of worm, once common during the Cambrian period, would use these teeth as a specialized feeding device, scraping the seafloor or raking debris into its digestive tract.
Researchers named the worm Kraytdraco spectatus because of its resemblance to the krayt dragon, a fictional creature from the “Star Wars” universe.
“When I started finding this wormy-looking animal that came from a canyon, that was full of teeth and looked brownish under the microscope, there were too many points in common with the fictional beast,” said Mussini. “We thought, this is a great excuse to give this animal a pop culture-inspired name.”
Along with the worm, rock-scraping mollusks and filter-feeding crustaceans were also discovered.
After the initial expedition in 2023, Mussini returned to the Grand Canyon this spring to collect more samples, which he hopes will bear more fossilized discoveries.
“It really is a retracing of our origins, just deeper in time than the study of our immediate ancestors,” said Mussini. “Thinking about this unfolding in a place like the Grand Canyon, which to this day has this wonderful natural heritage, just adds a lot of depth to it. You think of this place being a library of changes in the Earth’s environment going back half a billion years.”
John Leos covers environmental issues for The Arizona Republic and azcentral. Send tips or questions to john.leos@arizonarepublic.com.
Environmental coverage on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Researchers uncover tiny fossils in the Grand Canyon
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