“Swimming Head” was the king of the sea 500 million years ago: study

The killer whale is apparently the king of the ocean these days, but in prehistoric times that title went to a “swimmer’s head”.

It is according to pRandom scientists at the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada who recently discovered a gigantic relative of the horseshoe crab in the 500-million-year-old Burgess Shale in British Columbia, according to CBS News.

The newly discovered species is known as “Titanokorys gainesi” and measured 19.7 inches at a time when most ocean organisms were barely the size of a little finger.

“The size of this animal is absolutely breathtaking, it is one of the largest animals of the Cambrian period ever found”, Jean-Bernard Caron, Richard M. Ivey curator of the museum of invertebrate paleontology and associate professor at the University of Toronto said in a Press release praise the discovery.

According to the statement, Titanokorys belong to a group of primitive arthropods called radiodons, which “had multifaceted eyes, a mouth shaped like a pineapple slice and lined with teeth, a pair of thorny claws under the head to capture prey and a body with a series of flaps for swimming.

The creature’s head is “so long in relation to the body that these animals are in reality little more than swimming heads,” Joe Moysiuk, Ph.D. studying ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Toronto who co -writes the study, said in the statement.

Researchers are still trying to figure out why the creature’s head was so big, but believe it was an adaptation to help it live near the seabed, according to CNN.

“Their limbs at the front looked like several stacked rakes and would have been very effective in bringing whatever they caught in their tiny thorns back to their mouths. The huge back shell could have worked like a plow, ”study co-author Jean-Bernard Caron told CNN.

The fossils will be on display at the Royal Ontario Museum from December.