Decaying Fish Offer Clues to Early Evolution

I don't know how much this group of university paleontologists gets compensated, but they deserve something above and beyond the normal pay grade. Over the course of six months, a team from the University of Leicester stuck it out watching fish rot - all in the course of science, mind you. The object of their malodorous mission? To investigate patterns in the decomposition of soft body tissues to get a better handle on understanding fossils.

Scientists have only been able to find a handful of vertebrate fossils with remaining soft-tissue. That's particularly true of remains from the early phases of vertebrate evolution. The fact is that the absence of a good documentary record of what the team described as these "landmark events in the history of life," means we know very little about the shape and look - and evolution - of the creatures that first slithered out of the ocean and onto land. I

n theory, some very important pieces of the evolutionary record may have been overlooked because they were forever lost to decomposition.What to do? Why, obviously, let fish carcasses waste away and then take good notes of which parts turn to mush and disappear before the others. (And make sure to bring along a good pair nose clips.) The scientists' research, published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B., may help shed light on decay patterns. One finding: the later-evolved parts of the body are lost soonest.

You get can a sense of what the researchers dealt with on a day-to-day basis in the video below: