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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 perplexawas 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.
Some researchers, however, are not the only ones to notice the caricature of the creature. This is also what the old animal means for science.
(Daniel Ocampo R, Vencejo Films)
Javier Luque, a postdoctoral paleontologist at Yale University and at the University of Alberta, said the "cute", "unusual" decapod crustacean would spur 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 on Thursday. The Washington Post.
(Oksana Vernygora / University of Alberta)
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 and the United States, published their findings Wednesday in the newspaper Progress of science.
The research helps to better understand a creature so special that it has been dubbed "the platypus of the world of crab", according to a press release.
So what do we know about this wide-eyed creature?
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.
(Elissa Martin / Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History)
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. Researchers believe that the crab had a "mosaic of body parts," including unprotected compound eyes, a spindle-shaped body, and leg-shaped portions of the mouth suggesting that it retained larval features until the adulthood, Luque explained.
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".
2019 © The Washington Post
This article was originally published by The Washington Post.
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