A "weird" chimera fossil fossil has been discovered: "One wonders what else is there"

Even Dr. Frankenstein and his monster would be jealous of this creature.

Paleontologists have uncovered the fossil of an ancient crab that lived between 90 and 95 million years ago and that is so "completely bizarre" that it literally surprised the researchers.

Known as Callichimaera perplexawhich means "beautiful puzzled chimera", the crab had an assortment of body parts that would make Mr. Potato Head green with envy.

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"We started looking at these fossils and found that they had what looked like larvae eyes, shrimp jaws, frog crab claws and a lobster shell," he said. Javier Luque, lead author and postdoctoral paleontologist. in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta and Yale University, in a statement.

Luque added, "We have an idea of ​​what a typical crab looks like – and these new fossils are breaking all these rules."

In Greek mythology, a chimera had the head of a lion, the body of a goat and the tail of a snake.

The researchers wrote that discovery and From C. perplexa the body type challenges the conventional vision of what previous crabs looked like. "Our phylogenetic analyzes, including representatives of all major fossil and extant fossil crabs, challenge conventional conceptions of their evolution by revealing multiple convergent losses of a typical" crab "body plan since the beginning of the century. Cretaceous, "reads in the summary of the study.

The study was published in the journal Progress of science.

The giant eyes of the crab probably helped to hunt smaller crustaceans while swimming in the oceans of the Cretaceous period. "We do not think that they were filter filters," Luque told Live Science. "We think that they were actually active predators."

C. perplexa was discovered for the first time in 2005 in the Andes, along with other ancient crustaceans such as lobster and shrimp. Since then, Luque and a team of researchers have analyzed the fossil (not more than a quarter) in detail and have suggested that he spends his life swimming, in contrast to modern crabs, who spend their life crawling.

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"We found dozens of animals, ranging from tiny specimens of babies to mature individuals, in which we found reproductive organs – a smoking gun that proves that it was a problem." Adult organisms and not larvae. We can even see individual facets on the big eyes made up of these creatures, "Luque said in his statement. "It's an incredible amount of detail and we've been able to rebuild it as if they lived yesterday."

Luque said that it was not unusual to find different body types in older rocks because life was always expanding in new forms.

"This discovery, from the middle of the Cretaceous, shows that there are still surprising discoveries of newer and more strange organisms waiting to be discovered, especially in the tropics," he said. he concluded. "One wonders what else is there for us to discover?"

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