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Congrats to @Spongy Joe Joe Botting and associates on this exceptional new discovery! "New fossil sponges from the latest Ordovician (444 Ma) Anji Biota are interpreted as crown-group euplectellids, within the Venus' flower basket morphological group. Two species are described here (one in open nomenclature), with a range of characters limited specifically to the modern group. These new occurrences extend the known record of the family by more than 300 myr from the previous earliest record, in the Cretaceous. The date of the Anji Biota is substantially older even than molecular clock predictions for the origin of the family (Carboniferous/Permian), and indicates a long cryptic history of the group. The deep-water setting of the Anji Biota, combined with previous records of stem-group rossellids, suggests that hexactinellids experienced a long history in the normally unpreservable deep-ocean environrnent that they occupy today. This new discovery thus highlights our lack of knowledge of the early evolution of bathyal to abyssal ecosystems." Botting, J.P., Janussen, D., Muir, L.A., Dohrmann, M., Ma, J., Zhang, Y. 2022 Extraordinarily Early Venus' Flower Basket Sponges (Hexactinellida, Euplectellidae) from the Uppermost Ordovician Anji Biota, China. Palaeontology, 65(2):1-15 [e12592]