Before looking like it looks right now, life tried some weird shapes… especially during the first million years.
Now, paleontologists have discovered an arthropod with an unusual shell and a long body that consisted of about 110 segments, each with a pair of limbs.
Named Balhuticaris voltae, the strange animal was found in 508-million-year-old Canadian deposits.
The researchers from the University of Toronto (UoT) said that the new species surpasses any other arthropod of the Cambrian period in terms of the number of segments.
The Burgess Shale is a Canadian site estimated to be 508 million years old.
The place is known for its well-preserved fossils of marine organisms from the Cambrian period.
The Burgess Shale aso have the so-called bivalve arthropods, this is a combined group of Cambrian arthropods, that has a two valves-carapace.
Now Alejandro Izquierdo-López and Jean-Bernard Caron from UoT described a new bivalve arthropod from the Burgess Shale.
The ancient animal had an unusually shaped carapace and a long body consisting of about 110 segments.
Each of the segments carried a pair of limbs, and no other Cambrian arthropod has such a number of segments (that we know of).
(Hugo Salais / Izquierdo-López & Caron / iScience, 2022 https://bit.ly/3P0Ph5J)
The couple studied 11 specimens in total, and the largest one reached 244.7 millimeters in length.
The paleontologists note that by the standards of Cambrian organisms, this is a real giant, and at the moment it is the largest bivalve arthropod among all known to science.
The researchers named the animal Balhuticaris voltae, a generic name given in honor of Balhut (or Bahamut), a giant fish from Arab mythology.
The team believes that B. voltae was a representative of nektobenthos - it lived both at the bottom of the oceans and in water columns.
Izquierdo-López and Caron note that Balhuticaris was an excellent swimmer, and possibly swam upside down, like modern branchills (Anostraca).
The ancient animal apparently fed on small organisms.
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