The habit of some scientists of assigning newly discovered species the honorary name of famous people could not miss the opportunity to refer to soccer player Lionel Messi. In May 2021, six Argentine scientists published an article in the specialized magazine Zoologischer Anzeiger in which they reported the existence in the Andes of a hitherto unknown species of lizard of the genus Liolaemus and proposed the scientific name Liolaemus messii for it.
Four Argentine researchers have now had a similar occurrence and have assigned the name Discinisca messii to a species of small brachiopod (marine animal similar to bivalve crustaceans) of which the first fossil specimens have been discovered and described.
In this respect, too, Messi follows in the footsteps of Maradona, who has species such as the wasp Anaphes maradonae and the fossil dragonfly Librelula maradoniana named after him.
The Argentine science writer and journalist Federico Kukso has published in the SINC agency a long and detailed informative article in which he explains some details of the naming of the recently discovered fossil. After heading “Small and exceptional”, the Argentine journalist begins his chronicle with a style worthy of a sports commentator: “It was going to happen. And in the end it happened: an Argentine paleontologist discovered a new species in Patagonia and named it after the football player Lionel Messi”. “But now it has been neither a long-necked, stout-legged titanosaur like Patagotitan or Argentinosaurus, nor a huge, ferocious predator like Meraxes gigas, Skorpiovenator or Carnotaurus. It’s a tiny, fish-like marine organism. mollusk that lived 20 million years ago. He called it Discinisca messii,” says Federico Kukso.
“The researcher Damián E. Pérez paid homage to the world champion and current Paris Saint-Germain player [the chronicle is signed before the news of the possible signing by the Inetre of Miami] by naming that small but at the same time rare and wonderful shell”. “As far as I understand, it is the first fossil that bears the name of Messi,” reveals this paleontologist from the Patagonian National Center (CENPAT), in Puerto Madryn, Chubut (Argentina).
It all began in 2021, when Pérez, together with his colleagues from the Patagonian Institute of Geology and Paleontology of CENPAT, embarked on the study of the Gaiman Formation, to the east of the province of Chubut, in Argentine Patagonia, in which sediments stand out. mariners from 20 to 10 million years ago. Known more for the ancient remains of whales, sharks and dolphins located there, this has been little explored in search of invertebrate fossils, details Ferderico Kukso.
“The fossils are found both in the soil and within the outcrops, so there is no need to drill or excavate,” according to paleoecologist Aylén Allende Mosquera, co-author of the research.
In a campaign to the Bryn Gwyn Paleontological Park (“White Hill†in Welsh), seven kilometers from the town of Gaiman, in June of that year, they found something strange: the remains of a brachiopod, that is, small marine animals and clam-like loners, though not related to them. “It caught our attention very quickly because this shell has a glassy appearance,†warns Pérez.
Six months later, during another campaign in outcrops to the north of the city of Puerto Madryn, in a place called Cañadón del Puma, they located a second specimen.
After studying these pieces —and others found in forgotten collections—, the researchers deduced that they were very rare brachiopods. “They belong to the group of lingulids, of the genus Discinisca,” specifies Pérez.
“The Discinisca messii fossil is approximately 2.5 cm long,” explains the paleontologist. It was a “filter feeder,” feeding on small microorganisms found in water, such as diatoms and other plankton organisms. It surely had “few predators”, especially given how rare it was. “Rare like Messi” and, surely, “prey for crabs or some fish”.