500 million-year-old ‘abnormal shrimp’ used facial spikes to ‘pincushion’ soft prey

Round 500 million years in the past, an apex predator no bigger than a home cat terrorized the seas searching for prey to puncture with its spiky facial appendages.

For years, paleontologists thought that the arthropod Anomalocaris canadensis, whose title roughly means “the irregular shrimp from Canada,” used its spears to pierce trilobites and different hard-shelled prey. Nevertheless, a brand new examine finds that this Cambrian critter possible hunted soft-bodied animals as an alternative, in accordance with a examine revealed July 5 within the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.