Science
Related: About this forumHelmet-headed Cambrian sea monster sucked up prey like a Roomba
By Mindy Weisberger about 6 hours ago
Its size is "absolutely mind-boggling," said the scientist who described the fossil.
Titanokorys gainesi was one of the largest marine predators during the Cambrian period. (Image credit: Animation by Lars Fields, copyright Royal Ontario Museum )
A creature with a massive head shield, sand-raking claws and a circular tooth-filled mouth swept across the ocean bottom half-a-billion years ago, hoovering up prey like a living Roomba.
Measuring nearly 2 feet (50 centimeters) long, Titanokorys gainesi a newfound genus and species had a flattened body and a broad head that made up approximately two-thirds of its total length, researchers reported in a new study.
Titanokorys was one of the biggest ocean predators of the Cambrian period (543 million to 490 million years ago) and is the largest-known Cambrian seafloor predator, according to a new study. Compared with most other sea life at the time, its size was "absolutely mind-boggling," lead study author Jean-Bernard Caron, a curator of invertebrate palaeontology at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto, said in a statement.
"It's like a swimming head in a big helmet," Caron told Live Science. "It's a very unusual shape."
Caron and study co-author Joe Moysiuk, a doctoral candidate in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Toronto, pieced together the long-extinct creature's anatomy from 12 fossil fragments collected at the Burgess Shale, a fossil deposit in British Columbia, Canada, dating to about 508 million years ago.
More:
https://www.livescience.com/cambrian-giant-swimming-head.html?utm_source=notification
eppur_se_muova
(36,261 posts)Apparently, Anomalocaris is being reevaluated, in terms of its feeding habits and even exoskeletal structure.
But Anomalocaris lacked the hood-like carapace, and apparently fed in the water column; the new discovery appears to be a bottom feeder. So new genus. But viewed from below, they sure look like variations on a theme.
myccrider
(484 posts)radiodonta, according to the article, which includes anomolacaris.
Human order is primate. Were a variation on that theme.