Paleontologists uncover a 500-million-year-old, 3-eyed predator : NPR

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Danielle Dufault/Royal Ontario Museum Paleontologists have found a three-eyed creature with a pencil sharpener-like mouth that roamed the ocean for prey greater than 500 million years in the past.

The fossilized stays of 1 Mosura fentoni — nicknamed the "sea moth" — have been discovered within the Burgess Shale of Canadian Rockies, presenting researchers with new perception into animal life within the Cambrian interval, in accordance with a paper revealed this week within the journal Royal Society Open Science.

The predator was concerning the size of an index finger, with three eyes dotting its head and a round mouth lined with enamel, in accordance with paleontologists on the Manitoba Museum and Royal Ontario Museum who made the invention. The beast was additionally geared up with flaps on either side of its physique for swimming, and had intimidating claws extending from its head.

"It has a pair of those jointed claws on the entrance of its head which have these very lengthy spines on them," mentioned lead research writer Joe Moysiuk, curator of paleontology and geology on the Manitoba Museum.

"It offers it nearly a little bit of an Edward Scissorhands look."

The invention of the Mosura — a part of the extinct group, radiodonts — revealed that the creature was rather more advanced than fossils of different radiodonts beforehand urged, in accordance with researchers.

Quite than the straightforward abdomen-like space noticed in different radiodonts, at its rear, this creature's physique included 16 segments lined with gills, just like trendy arthropods.

"One of many actually fascinating issues about this discovery is that multi-segmented abdomen-like area of the physique of this new species, and it is one thing that we have not seen in any of its shut family members earlier than," Moysiuk mentioned. "It exhibits us that these animals have been able to modifying completely different areas of their physique and specializing them for various types of features, which is one thing that we see in plenty of the residing family members."

The well-preserved fossil confirmed the Mosura's open circulatory system, consisting of a coronary heart that pumped blood into giant physique cavities, known as lacunae.

The ocean moth is believed to have used its physique flaps to swim equally to trendy stingrays, sharing the waters with fellow radiodont and early apex predator, the enduring Anomalocaris canadensis.

Stewart Edie, a paleobiologist on the Smithsonian Museum of Pure Historical past, mentioned the invention of the Mosura offers scientists higher perception into how numerous life on Earth was even previous to the Cambrian explosion — throughout which advanced life started to take form.

"The Cambrian Explosion is legendary for establishing the foundational physique plans for many of the main animal teams we all know right now — however much less clear has been how shortly or extensively evolution was continuing inside them," Edie mentioned.

"The latest discovery of Mosura exhibits {that a} group of arthropods — one long-held to be quite pedestrian in its evolutionary historical past in comparison with its shut family members — was in on the 'explosion,' too."