By studying a macabre collection of decaying lampreys, scientists have found that certain body features rot away before others – and that the bits that are first to go are the most useful to palaeontologists. This decay bias makes it much more difficult to distinguish them from their ancestors and could mean that many fossils have been wrongly placed in evolutionary trees. Read the full paper at www.nature.com/nature and the news story at http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100129/full/news.2010.45.html
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