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Often, a discovery isn’t so much about gathering new information as it is about looking at something from a new perspective. That’s not always simple — except in the case of a newly described fossil sea anemone, when it was as simple as turning a presumed jellyfish fossil upside down.

The fossil, first described in 1971, is famous in both scientific and amateur paleontology circles for being such an easy to find fossil, despite totally lacking a skeleton. But it turns out, the story of the creature was a bizarre case of mistaken identity, scientists reported in a study published March 8 in the journal Papers in Paleontology (opens in new tab) . 

The Mazon Creek fossil beds in Illinois, which formed 309 million years ago, capture a glimpse of water-dwelling species that lived during the warm, wet Carboniferous period (358.9 million to 298.9 million years ago). At that time, the area was an estuary, where silty fresh water from a river flowed into an ocean that covered much of modern-day North America. When plants and animals died in this estuary, often they would be quickly covered in sediment, which led to the impeccable fossilization of not only animal skeletons but also soft-bodied animals, like jellyfish, that typically don’t fossilize well. 

That’s why Mazon Creek is so remarkable. “These fossils are better preserved than Twinkies after an apocalypse,” study co-author James Hagadorn (opens in new tab) , an expert on unusual fossil preservation at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, said in a statement (opens in new tab) . “In part that’s because many of them burrowed into the seafloor as they were being buried by a stormy avalanche of mud.” The most common fossil found at Mazon Creek is that of a bizarre jellyfish called Essexella asherae but more casually referred to as “the blobs” by the amateur fossil hunters who have historically collected them as souvenirs.

But in 2016, Roy Plotnick (opens in new tab) , a professor emeritus of invertebrate paleobiology and paleontology at the University of Illinois Chicago, noticed that something seemed off about E. asherae.

Related: 520-million-year-old sea monster had 18 mouth tentacles

Essexella, a 309 million-year-old fossil sea anemone from Illinois. (Image credit: Papers in Palaeontology)

“I’ve always looked at these jellyfish fossils and I’ve thought, ‘That doesn’t look right to me,'” Plotnick, lead author of the new study, told Live Science. That lingering hunch led Plotnick to invite Hagadorn and Graham Young (opens in new tab) , curator of geology and paleontology at the Manitoba Museum in Canada, to reexamine the thousands of E. asherae fossils held at the Field Museum in Chicago as well as other museums and private collections. 

Plotnick told Live Science that Young and Hagadorn are experts in jellyfish fossils and their preservation, so if anybody had a chance of making sense of these creatures, it would likely be them. 

E. asherae looks downright bizarre compared with a stereotypical jellyfish, or medusa, which many envision as a mushroom-like cap that looks to be molded out of petroleum jelly with trailing, party-streamer-like tentacles. But not E. asherae. Fossils suggest that instead of sporting delicate tentacles underneath the cap, E. asherae rocked a membranous skirt, which would make it unique, especially among modern jellyfish, all of which swim around unskirted. 

E. asherae’s true nature was revealed when Plotnick and colleagues noticed that the cap didn’t look like a cap at all. Instead, it resembled the muscular foot that many sea anemones use to burrow into the sea floor.Related stories—Mysterious blood-red jellyfish may be rare species unknown to science, researchers say

—Giant ‘phantom jellyfish’ that eats with mouth-arms spotted off California coast

—What’s the weirdest sea creature ever discovered?

“I said, ‘Wait a minute; that looks like the foot of a sea anemone,'” Plotnick said. When he flipped the specimen over, he had an epiphany: E. asherae wasn’t a jellyfish at all. It was a bulbous sea anemone that anchored itself to the seafloor with its muscular foot. At the risk of oversimplification, anemones are relatives of jellyfish that filter-feed in the water column as opposed to swimming through it.

Further examination revealed that the “skirt” was actually the anemone’s barrel-shaped body, with a hole at the top to allow it to suck in water for feeding. Moreover, tiny snails that had fossilized with E. asherae were not the ancestors of modern jellyfish parasites but  rather scavengers that were buried while feeding on E. asherae corpses, further separating E. asherae from the jellyfish it was thought to be. 

The team’s analysis showed that paleontologists hadn’t just identified the specimen as the wrong species — they’d also placed it in the completely wrong taxonomic order, the broad grouping above family and species.  This means taking the animal out of the order Semaeostomeae, which contains jellyfish, and into the sea anemone order, Actiniaria. It’s a big shift that has literally turned our understanding of this common fossil on its head.

Editor’s note: Updated at 12:47 p.m. EDT on March 16 to correct Roy Plotnick’s title. He is at the University of Illinois Chicago, not the University of Chicago. 

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Silicon Valley’s early return on Trump investment: Plunging valuations, delayed IPOs

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Silicon Valley's early return on Trump investment: Plunging valuations, delayed IPOs

The Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, June 9, 2023.

Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Silicon Valley executives and financiers publicly opened their wallets in support of President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential run. The early returns in 2025 aren’t great, to say the least.

Following Trump’s sweeping tariff plan announced Wednesday, the Nasdaq suffered steep consecutive daily drops to finish 10% lower for the week, the index’s worst performance since the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020.

The tech industry’s leading CEO’s rushed to contribute to Trump’s inauguration in January and paraded to Washington, D.C., for the event. Since then, it’s been a slog.

The market can always turn around, but economists and investors aren’t optimistic, and concerns are building of a potential recession. The seven most valuable U.S. tech companies lost a combined $1.8 trillion in market cap in two days.

Apple slid 14% for the week, its biggest drop in more than five years. Tesla, led by top Trump adviser Elon Musk, plunged 9.2% and is now down more than 40% for the year. Musk contributed close to $300 million to help propel Trump back to the White House.

Nvidia, Meta and Amazon all suffered double-digit drops for the week. For Amazon, a ninth straight weekly decline marks its longest such losing streak since 2008.

With Wall Street selling out of risky assets on concern that widespread tariff hikes will punish the U.S. and global economy, the fallout has drifted down to the IPO market. Online lender Klarna and ticketing marketplace StubHub delayed their IPOs due to market turbulence, just weeks after filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and fintech company Chime is also reportedly delaying its listing.

CoreWeave, a provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure, last week became the first venture-backed company to raise more than $1 billion in a U.S. IPO since 2021. But the company slashed its offering, and trading has been very volatile in its opening days on the market. The stock plunged 12% on Friday, leaving it 17% above its offer price but below the bottom of its initial range.

“You couldn’t create a worse market and macro environment to go public,” said Phil Haslett, co-founder of EquityZen, a platform for investing in private companies. “Way too much turbulence. All flights are grounded until further notice.”

CoreWeave investor Mark Klein of SuRo Capital previously told CNBC that the company could be the first in an “IPO parade.” Now he’s backtracking.

“It appears that the IPO parade has been temporarily halted,” Klein told CNBC by email on Friday. “The current tariff situation has prompted these companies to pause and assess its impact.”

Tech will see an 'economic armageddon' if these tariffs stay, says Wedbush's Dan Ives

‘Cave rapidly’

During last year’s presidential campaign, prominent venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen backed Trump, expecting that his administration would usher in a boom and eliminate some of the hurdles to startup growth set up by the Biden administration. Andreessen and his partner, Ben Horowitz, said in July that their financial support of the Trump campaign was due to what they called a better “little tech agenda.”

A spokesperson for Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment.

Some techies who supported Trump in the campaign have taken to social media to defend their positions.

Venture capitalist Keith Rabois, a managing director at Khosla Ventures, posted on X on Thursday that “Trump Derangement Syndrome has morphed into Tariff Derangement Syndrome.” He said tariffs aren’t inflationary, are effective at reducing fentanyl imports, and he expects that “most other countries will cave and cave rapidly.”

That was before China’s Finance Ministry said on Friday that it will impose a 34% tariff on all goods imported from the U.S. starting on April 10.

At Sequoia Capital, which is the biggest investor in Klarna, outspoken Trump supporter Shaun Maguire, wrote on X, “The first long-term thinking President of my lifetime,” and said in a separate post that, “The price of stocks says almost nothing about the long term health of an economy.”

However, Allianz Chief Economic Advisor Mohamed El-Erian warned on Friday that Trump’s extensive raft of import tariffs are putting the U.S. economy at risk of recession.

“You’ve had a major repricing of growth prospects, with a recession in the U.S. going up to 50% probability, you’ve seen an increase in inflation expectations, up to 3.5%,” he told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro on the sidelines of the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio, Italy.

Former Microsoft CEOs Bill Gates, left, and Steve Ballmer, center, pose for photos with CEO Satya Nadella during an event celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Microsoft on April 4, 2025 in Redmond, Washington. 

Stephen Brashear | Getty Images

Meanwhile, executives at tech’s megacap companies were largely silent this week, and their public relations representatives declined to provide comments about their thinking.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was in the awkward position on Friday of celebrating his company’s 50th anniversary at corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Alongside Microsoft’s prior two CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Nadella sat down with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin for a televised interview that was planned well before Trump’s tariff announcement.

When asked about the tariffs at the top of the interview, Nadella effectively dodged the question and avoided expressing his views about whether the new policies will hamper Microsoft’s business.

Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014, acknowledged to Sorkin that “disruption is very hard on people” and that, “as a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good.” Ballmer and Gates are two of the 12 wealthiest people in the world thanks to their Microsoft fortunes.

C-suites may not be able to stay quiet for long, especially if the recent turmoil spills into next week.

Lise Buyer, who previously helped guide Google through its IPO and now works as an adviser to companies going public, said there’s no appetite for risk in the market under these conditions. But there is risk that staffers get jittery, and they’ll surely look to their leaders for some reassurance.

“Until markets settle out and we have the opportunity to access valuation levels, public company CEOs should work to calm potentially distressed employees,” Buyer said in an email. “And private company managements should refine plans to get by on dollars already in the treasury.”

— CNBC’s Hayden Field, Jordan Novet, Leslie Picker, Annie Palmer and Samantha Subin contributed to this report.

WATCH: Chime is reportedly delaying its IPO

Chime is reportedly delaying its IPO

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UK

Jaguar Land Rover to ‘pause’ US shipments over Donald Trump tariffs

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Jaguar Land Rover to 'pause' US shipments over Donald Trump tariffs

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has said it will “pause” shipments to the US as the British car firm works to “address the new trading terms” of Donald Trump’s tariffs.

The US president has introduced a 25% levy on all foreign cars imported into the country, which came into force on Thursday.

JLR, one of the country’s biggest carmakers, exported about 38,000 cars to the US in the third quarter of 2024 – almost equal to the amount sold to the UK and the EU combined.

Follow live updates: Trump’s baseline 10% tariff kicks in

In a statement on Saturday, a spokesperson for the company behind the Jaguar, Land Rover and Range Rover brands said: “The USA is an important market for JLR’s luxury brands.

“As we work to address the new trading terms with our business partners, we are taking some short-term actions including a shipment pause in April, as we develop our mid- to longer-term plans.”

The company released a statement last week before Mr Trump announced a “baseline” 10% tariff on goods from around the world, which kicked in on Saturday morning, on what he called “liberation day”.

More on Donald Trump

JLR reassured customers its business was “resilient” and “accustomed to changing market conditions”.

“Our priorities now are delivering for our clients around the world and addressing these new US trading terms,” the firm said.

Trading across the world has been hit by Mr Trump’s tariff announcement at the White House on Wednesday.

All but one stock on the FTSE 100 fell on Friday – with Rolls-Royce, banks and miners among those to suffer the sharpest losses.

Read more: A red wall on Wall Street – but Trump seems to believe it will work out

Cars are the top product exported from the UK to the US, with exports worth £8.3bn in the year to the end of September 2024, according to data from the Office for National Statistics.

For UK carmakers, the US is the second largest export market behind the European Union.

Industry groups have previously warned the tariffs will force firms to rethink where they trade, while a report by thinktank the Institute for Public Policy Research said more than 25,000 car manufacturing jobs in the UK could be at risk.

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Two people die after caravan fire at holiday park in Lincolnshire

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Two people die after caravan fire at holiday park in Lincolnshire

Two people have died following a fire at a caravan site near Skegness, Lincolnshire Police have said.

In a statement, officers said they were called at 3.53am on Saturday to a report of a blaze at Golden Beach Holiday Park in the village of Ingoldmells.

Fire and rescue crews attended the scene, and two people were found to have died.

They were reported to be a 10-year-old girl and a 48-year-old man.

The force said the victims’ next of kin have been informed and will be supported by specially trained officers.

Officers are trying to establish the exact cause of the blaze.

“We are at the very early stages of our investigation and as such we are keeping an open mind,” the force said.

Two fire crews remain at the scene.

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