University of Alberta paleontologists discovered a new and bizarre species of crab fossil with features of many different marine arthropods.
“We started looking at these fossils and we found they had what looked like the eyes of a larva, the mouth of a shrimp, claws of a frog crab and the carapace of a lobster,“ said Javier Luque, a U of A post-doctoral fellow, who thought of a chimera, a monster out of Greek mythology with a lion’s head, a goat’s body and a snake’s tail, when he came upon the discovery.
“These new fossils break all those rules."
While the unusual crab has features of many different families, the paleontologists found it actually occupies a new branch on the crustacean tree of life—not unlike a platypus of the crab world, explained Luque.
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Image via University of Alberta.