Near what is now southwestern China, 500 million years ago, there was a creature shaped like a toilet brush. Imagine that toilet brush with eyes bobbing on stalks, a pair of spike-lined armlike appendages, and a tail fan with long, sweeping blades, and you'll have a pretty good image of an animal that lived during the Cambrian Period.
The fossils were found in the Chengjiang Lagersttte in China's Yunnan province. A group of extinct ocean-dwelling ancestral arthropods called radiodonts are the subject of a new report.
The odd animal was initially identified as a radiodont species. The group is named after the ring of teeth around the animals' mouths. The raptorial appendages, the frontmost pair of spiky limbs, were different from all other radiodonts', which led to a recent reevaluation of the fossils.
Though radiodonts have similar body plans, species are distinguished mainly by their diverse forms of raptorial appendages, and those of the fossil were so unique that researchers determined it was a new species.
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The name of the species was inspired by the Latin words for "innovation" and "crab", as well as the location where the fossils were found. Radiodonts are one of the oldest giant apex predators on Earth and were one of the ocean's most fearsome predator when it lived.
He said that their appearance in the early Cambrian indicated the formation of a complex food web. Radiodonta have a very strange shape that has puzzled scientists for over a century.
For decades, the isolated body parts of radiodonts were identified as belonging to a variety of animal groups. Some of the animal's unusual radiodont relatives had backward-facing mouths and claw-tipped trunks, while others looked like the Millennium Falcon in a movie.
When scientists found the first complete radiodont fossils in the 1980s, they were able to determine the group's classification as an ancestral line of arthropods.
The large eyes and spinous raptorial appendages suggest that it had good vision. Gills and flaps along its trunk were used to breathe and swim. This animal was an active predator because of the body structures.
New clues about arthropod ancestors are offered by I. maotianshan. New questions arise about the group's ecology and evolution over their 120 million-year history, such as how many species there were, how they hunted and fed on their ocean prey, and how they evolved.
There is still much to be discovered about the group's diversity and evolutionary history according to Zeng. New fossils of Radiodonta will tell us a lot.
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