The first matrushka

From Austin, Texas, at a meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology

A team of German paleontologists has unearthed a fossil that preserves one creature inside another that’s nestled inside yet another, a Paleozoic version of the Russian nesting dolls known as matrushkas.

The unusual find came from material deposited about 290 million years ago in a large lake in a mountainous area of what is now southwestern Germany, says Stephanie Klug, a paleontologist at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin.