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Even Dr. Frankenstein and his monster would be jealous of this creature.
Paleontologists have unearthed 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 perplexa, which means "beautiful perplexed chimera", the crab had an assortment of body parts that would make Mr. Potato Head green with envy.
"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 at the Department of Biological Sciences of the University of Alberta and Yale University, in a statement.
Luque continued: "We have an idea of what a typical crab looks like – and these new fossils break 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 the discovery and body type of C. perplexa challenged the conventional view of what the previous crabs looked like.
"Our phylogenetic analyzes, including representatives of all major fossil and extant crab lineages, challenge traditional conceptions of their evolution by revealing multiple convergent losses of a typical" crab-like "body plan since the early Cretaceous. ", we read in the study.
The study was published in the journal Science Advances.
The giant eyes of the crab probably helped to hunt smaller crustaceans by swimming in the oceans of the Cretaceous era. "We do not think they were powered by a filter," 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.
"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 replenish it as if they lived yesterday."
Luque said it was not unusual to find different types of bodies in older rocks, because life was still taking on new forms.
"This discovery, from the middle of the Cretaceous, illustrates the fact that there are still surprising discoveries of strange, newer, more recent organisms, especially in the tropics," he concluded.
"One wonders" what else to discover? "
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