Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Wednesday July 31 2019, @08:16AM   Printer-friendly
from the chew-or-be-chewed dept.

Palaeontologists at the Royal Ontario Museum and University of Toronto have uncovered fossils of a large new predatory species in half-a-billion-year-old rocks from Kootenay National Park in the Canadian Rockies. This new species has rake-like claws and a pineapple-slice-shaped mouth at the front of an enormous head, and it sheds light on the diversity of the earliest relatives of insects, crabs, spiders, and their kin. The findings were announced July 31, 2019, in a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Reaching up to a foot in length, the new species, named Cambroraster falcatus, comes from the famous 506-million-year-old Burgess Shale. "Its size would have been even more impressive at the time it was alive, as most animals living during the Cambrian Period were smaller than your little finger," said Joe Moysiuk, a graduate student based at the Royal Ontario Museum who led the study as part of his Ph.D. research in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto. Cambroraster was a distant cousin of the iconic Anomalocaris, the top predator living in the seas at that time, but it seems to have been feeding in a radically different way," continued Moysiuk.

https://phys.org/news/2019-07-voracious-cambrian-predator-cambroraster-species.html

More information: A new hurdiid radiodont from the Burgess Shale evinces the exploitation of Cambrian infaunal food sources[$], Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 10.1098/rspb.2019.1079


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @09:43AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @09:43AM (#873479)

    Yep. The DOI in the summary, 10.1098/rspb.2000.1079, links to "Adherence and drug resistance: predictions for therapy outcome" by Lindi M. Wahl and Martin A. Nowak. Editors please make the appropriate corrections, use the following URL:

    https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.1079 [royalsocietypublishing.org]