Palaeobiology: The enzymes that made soft-tissue fossils scarce.

Decay enzymes proliferated over 500 million years ago, and this expansion is linked to a decline in soft-tissue preservation in the animal fossil record.

• Why it matters: Soft-tissue fossils provide rare insight into ancient biology, but their scarcity limits what can be reconstructed from the fossil record.
• What they did: The study examined the evolution of decay enzymes across deep time to assess how their spread relates to changes in preservation.
• The result: The findings suggest that enzyme proliferation contributed to soft-tissue fossils becoming scarce, leaving shells and skeletons dominant.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.