No.15 Radiolaria

Radiolaria are single-celled organisms such as plankton, and the oldest species are said to have existed for about 500 million years. They are extremely small (less than 1 mm in size), amoeba-like creatures with beautiful geometrical skeletons, and fossils of them have been found all over the world. Since the morphology of radiolarian fossils changes drastically from period to period, the age of the stratum in which they were deposited can be inferred by observing the fossils of radiolarian fossils that have been excavated.

The body length is only about 0.2 mm, and the extremely small lattice structure made it very difficult to obtain the shape of the specimen, but we were able to capture its silhouette using nano-focus CT. Although the shape of the tip of the body was lost, we were able to observe a part of the beautiful structure of the radiolarian.