Add the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle to the list of national publications that have taken note of the jellyfish fossils found in Utah and brought to Kansas for investigation.The Times reports: _Your average jellyfish washed up on a beach is hardly recognizable – just an amorphous blob, fast decomposing in the sun. (They don’t call them jellyfish for nothing.)__Which makes the discovery in Utah of four types of well-preserved fossil jellyfish from the Middle Cambrian period, half a billion years ago, all the more remarkable.__In a paper in the open-access online journal PLoS ONE, Paulyn Cartwright of the University of Kansas and colleagues report that these are the oldest jellyfish fossils yet described, by about 200 million years.__The fossils were found in the Marjum Formation in the west-central part of the state. During the Cambrian period, what is now Utah was covered in warm shallow seas, so fossils of many ancient marine organisms are found there. But such well-preserved specimens of soft creatures like jellyfish are uncommon. What helped in this case was that they were compressed into very fine sediment, preserving images of what appear to be tentacles and even some internal features._The Chronicle adds:_The fossil remains of this tribe of fragile jellyfish are of unequalled clarity, and their discoverers at the University of Kansas and the University of Utah say they’re guessing that the ancient ones were at least closely related to common jellies today, including those now known scientifically as the Narcomedusae and the Scyphozoae.__The fossils are more than 200 million years older than any scientists have found before. They clearly reveal their bell-shaped umbrellas, the wavering tentacles whose stings so often harass swimmers, and even the animals’ gonads.__But researchers say those creatures were unusually tiny, most barely a quarter-inch in diameter – or about the same as the tip of a pencil eraser. Their modern versions often run five times that size, said Kevin Raskoff, a marine biologist who has specialized in jellyfish research for years at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing and who now teaches at Monterey Peninsula College.__The fossils were found by a team headed by Bruce Lieberman, senior curator of invertebrate paleontology at the University of Kansas. His group’s report on the discovery appears in the current issue of PLoS One, an international online scientific journal published by the Public Library of Science in San Francisco._