| Title | A Voracious Cambrian Predator, Cambroraster, is a New Species from the Burgess Shale | |
| Date | Wednesday July 31 2019, @08:16AM | |
| Author | martyb | |
| Topic | ||
| 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
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printed from SoylentNews, A Voracious Cambrian Predator, Cambroraster, is a New Species from the Burgess Shale on 2023-06-18 07:24:19