Danielle de Carle

You had the courage to be wrong.

And because of that, we stumbled upon this amazing discovery.

If you hadn't had the courage to be wrong, we'd all still be leechless.

We'd be leechless.

That's true.

Yeah, it tells us a couple things.

First of all, it tells us that this group of animals, that leeches, are like 200 million years older than we thought they were initially.

It also tells us that

Despite the kind of prevailing sort of hypotheses at the time, it was unlikely that the first leech fed on vertebrate blood.

Instead, we think it was either a parasite of invertebrates or it was a predator.

And it also kind of tells us a little bit about the habitat of leeches.

So as Karma kind of mentioned earlier, most leeches today are either aquatic, living in freshwater, or there are terrestrial ones.

But we also have some kind of marine leeches.

And the prevailing wisdom before this new discovery was that those marine leeches represented sort of a single origin or a recolonization of the oceans, right?

Like the ancestor of this one lineage moved back into the oceans and

gave rise to a whole bunch of all the marine leeches that we see today.

Yeah, I think there's huge potential for discovering new fossils in collections that already exist.

I'm sure there are lots of projects just like the Riddler, you know, that generations of scientists never, they never found that one paper from the 70s that really kind of blew everything open, right?

And they just kind of put those things in a drawer and they're waiting to be rediscovered by new generations of people.

I think as well with new technologies, you know, again, with this, the Riddler, one of the technologies that they use to sort of get a lot more information was CT scanning, things like this, right?