Your Face Is Over 400 Million Years Old

Well, maybe not yours specifically, but faces in general. That's the evidence from a new fossil discovery in China:

Paleontologists working in China have uncovered 419-million-year-old fossil remains of a fish they've dubbed E[ntelognathus] primordialis, which sports the earliest known structures comparable to the modern jaw and facial bones in today's vertebrates, including humans.

The discovery "really is significant in helping to clarify this weird transformation – the evolution of faces," says Thomas Holtz Jr., a paleontologist at the University of Maryland at College Park.

It's one of those things that is forcing evolutionary biologists to rethink some things -- as in, sharks are not as primitive as we've thought.

Up to now, the general view has held that the common ancestor to the more-recent bony fish and land vertebrates, including humans, on the one hand, and to sharks and their relatives on the other, was shark-like, Dr. Yu says. That implied that sharks are more primitive than bony fish, whose additional facial bones were seen as newer in evolutionary terms.

The discovery of modern-looking structures in E. primordialis flips that picture, pointing to this bony, armored fish as a common ancestor to the lineage that would split into bony fish and the cartilaginous sharks.

That's one of the reasons I love science -- there's always something new to discover. Keeps life interesting, doesn't it?

A rendering of Entelognathus primordialis.

Brian Choo/Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology

Looks sort of formidable, doesn't it? Relax -- it was only about eight inches long.