HE HAS been called an “astounding swimmer with a large penis”. And he has just broken several palaeontological all-time records.
The talented Colymbosathon ecplecticos is a 5-millimetre-long ostracod, a tiny bivalve crustacean that lived 425 million years ago. Its 1-millimetre penis (at the bottom of the picture) is the oldest known, and is conclusive proof that ostracods reproduced sexually in the Silurian period. Some lineages of ostracods have been found to remain female for 100 million years, reproducing asexually via so-called “virgin births”.
Because C. ecplecticos’s soft tissues were well preserved, it has also yielded by far the earliest evidence…
