{"id":224519,"date":"2025-11-05T01:10:45","date_gmt":"2025-11-05T07:10:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/480-million-year-old-parasite-still-plagues-todays-shellfish"},"modified":"2025-11-05T01:10:45","modified_gmt":"2025-11-05T07:10:45","slug":"480-million-year-old-parasite-still-plagues-todays-shellfish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/480-million-year-old-parasite-still-plagues-todays-shellfish","title":{"rendered":"480-million-year-old Parasite Still Plagues Today\u2019s Shellfish"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/480-million-year-old-parasite-still-plagues-todays-shellfish3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A new study has unexpectedly discovered that a common parasite of modern oysters actually started infecting bivalves hundreds of millions of years before the dinosaurs went extinct.<\/p>\n<p>The research, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencedirect.com\/science\/article\/pii\/S2589004225019820\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in <i>iScience<\/i>, used high-resolution 3D scans to look inside 480-million-year-old shells from a Moroccan site known for its exceptionally well-preserved sea life. The scans revealed a series of distinctive patterns etched both on the surface of the fossils and hidden inside them.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe marks weren\u2019t random scratches,\u201d said Karma Nanglu, a UC Riverside paleobiologist who led the research. \u201cWe saw seven or eight of these perfect question mark shapes on each <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/shell\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">shell<\/a> fossil. That\u2019s a pattern.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A new study has unexpectedly discovered that a common parasite of modern oysters actually started infecting bivalves hundreds of millions of years before the dinosaurs went extinct. The research, published in iScience, used high-resolution 3D scans to look inside 480-million-year-old shells from a Moroccan site known for its exceptionally well-preserved sea life. The scans revealed [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-224519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-futurism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224519\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}