Fossil evidence tells only part of the story of an ancient organism. Take the roughly 550-million-year-old genus Parvancorina, a small, shield-shaped marine creature that doesn’t resemble any modern animal (the left image is a reconstruction). Limited to fossil analysis, paleontologists have wondered whether the organism had the ability to move through the water. Now, after a simulation in which Parvancorina were exposed to currents through computational fluid dynamics (CFD), scientists are fairly certain that it did. The CFD technique is enabling researchers to better understand how Parvancorina and other ancient creatures moved and fed.
At a 23 October session of the Geological Society of America’s 129th annual meeting, Oxford University paleobiologist Imran Rahman presented his work on three-dimensional digital models of Parvancorina. He developed the models based on fossils and then calculated how seawater would flow around the model organisms. Rahman found that turbulent currents flowing over the...