The Oldest Known Predator on Earth

In Charnwood Forest, near Leicester in England, palaeontologists uncovered a small, goblet-shaped fossil that rewrote the timeline of one of life’s oldest behaviours: hunting. Named Auroralumina attenboroughii — Latin for “dawn lantern,” after its torch-like shape — the 560-million-year-old creature is the earliest animal known to have preyed on others.

Auroralumina is an early cnidarian, a relative of today’s corals, jellyfish and anemones. It anchored to the seafloor and used tentacles to snare passing prey such as algae, zooplankton and tiny protists. Crucially, it also had a skeleton, making it the oldest skeletal animal yet found.

It pushes the history of predation as a way of life back by around 20 million years.

Most predators in the fossil record appear during the Cambrian Explosion roughly 540 million years ago, when complex animal life rapidly diversified. Auroralumina predates that burst by about 20 million years, hinting that the machinery of complex life — and the ancient arms race between hunter and hunted — began earlier than scientists had thought. It was honoured with the name of naturalist Sir David Attenborough.