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Lindsey Bever
Generalist journalist covering national and last-minute news
Scientists have discovered a new species of crab that swam in the seas 95 million years ago. And behold, it could be the next Pixar character.
The little pocket crab, named Callichimaera perplexa, was different from his modern cousins. This crab had a tiny shell reminiscent of lobster, legs flattened like a paddle, and huge Pound Puppies-like mirrors protruding from its head-a feature that indicates the creature was actively using its eyes in everything that was done. She was doing, said the researchers.
But it is not only the caricature of the creature that seduced some researchers, it is also what the ancient animal means for science. Javier Luque, a postdoctoral paleontologist from Yale University and the University of Alberta, said that the "pretty" decapod crustacean "unusual" would prompt scientists to "rethink what is wrong". is a crab ".
"This gives us information on how new body shapes can evolve over time," Luque said in an interview with the Washington Post.
[Washington Post employees rallied to save a crab. We named her Old Bae. Now we mourn.]
An artistic interpretation of Callichimaera perplexa, a crab species that lived 95 million years ago during the Cretaceous period. (Oksana Vernygora)
Luque said he made this discovery in 2005 in the mountains of Pesca, Colombia. An undergraduate student in geology of the time, Luque, said that he was looking for fossils when he discovered a treasure trove of well-preserved fossil specimens – shrimp, lobster and crabs with large bulbous eyes.
He and his research team, who studied fossils found in Colombia, as well as those found in the United States, published their findings Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. The research provides insight into a creature so special that it has been dubbed "the platypus of the crab world," according to a press release.
So what do we know about this wide-eyed creature?
An artistic re-enactment of the callichimaera perplexa, a creature so special that scientists have dubbed it "the platypus of the crab world". (Elissa Martin / Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History)
The crab lived in the middle of the Cretaceous, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, the masses of land were moving and the oceans were taking shape. Based on where fossils were found, he lived in what is now Colombia, North Africa and the United States – Wyoming, more precisely.
His name, Callichimaera perplexa, means "beautiful perplexed chimera", an allusion to a Greek mythological hybrid creature made up of body parts of multiple animals.
Logic. According to Luque, researchers believe that the crab has a "mosaic of body parts," including unprotected compound eyes, a spindle-shaped body, and leg-shaped portions of the mouth suggesting that it retains larval traits up to adulthood.
The body of the crab was about the size of a quarter.
His eyes were so big that, had he been human, he would have eyes as big as footballs.
His legs were built more for swimming, not for crawling.
His claw-shaped claws made him a powerful little hunter.
And if the crab had lived about 95 million years, he probably could have gone to Hollywood.
Luque, the main author of the study, told Live Science: "I call it my beautiful nightmare because it was so beautiful and frustrating" for researchers to understand it.
Heather Bracken-Grissom, an evolution biologist at Florida International University, specializing in decapods – crustaceans such as crabs or lobsters – said that today there are more than 7,000 species of crabs.
This "bizarre discovery," she said, will allow scientists to reassess what they know about them.
"This new transitional fossil makes us rethink how crabs have evolved over time as they introduce this unique bodily form that we did not know about before," Bracken-Grissom told The Post.
She said that it reveals "an early lineage in the crab of life".
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