An ancient shrimplike creature was thought to be the quintessential apex predator of its time, but a new study suggests it was more of a weakling than once assumed
With appendages growing out of its head and an armored mouth, an ancient shrimplike creature was thought to be the quintessential apex predator of its time. This sea creature earned its fearsome reputation because paleontologists thought it was responsible for the scarring and crushing of the fossilized skeletons of trilobites — early hard-shelled invertebrates that skittered along the seafloor before dying off in the mass extinction that gave way to the dinosaurs.
The model was based on a well-preserved but flattened fossil found in the Burgess Shale formation in the Canadian Rockies. Hunting with long appendages Earlier research had suggested that Anomalocaris’ mouth parts weren’t able to process hard food, so Bicknell and his colleagues focused on whether its long and spiny appendages would be able to chew up trilobite prey.
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