Tannocorri shrimp
The earliest life on Earth appeared 3.8 billion years ago, but in the more than three billion years that followed, the pace of life's evolution was slow and stagnant.
About 541 million years ago, the pace of evolution of life on Earth suddenly accelerated, a period known as the Cambrian explosion of life, which gave birth to the ancestors of almost all animal phylums today. In tens of millions of years, the ocean has changed from silent to bustling, and has begun to stage a life-and-death struggle, making the life world of the ocean lively and extraordinary.
Predators and predators engaged in a fierce arms race, and Cambrian animals evolved in strange directions.
Recently, scientists have found a new kind of strange-looking Cambrian top predator, Titanokorys, a predator with a body length of nearly 50 centimeters, a flattened body, a broad head, and the entire head accounts for about two-thirds of its total length in the Burgess Shale fossil site in The Cookney National Park in the Rocky Mountains of Canada.
The most conspicuous thing about the Titanicori shrimp is the huge horseshoe-shaped head carapace (upper part) covering the head, and two left-right symmetrical rigid carapaces (left and right), which together form a set of three-part armor that protects the head from all directions, and the tail of the body does not cover the long swimming paddle-like limbs on both sides of the carapace, which can help it cruise quickly to the bottom of the sea.
Titano Curry shrimp
From a taxonomic point of view, the TitanoCorri shrimp belongs to the primitive arthropod phylloscopic tooth order Radiodonta. Like all radialodonts, the Titanicori shrimp has a round mouth with teeth underneath its head, shaped like a pineapple flake, with a pair of appendages on either side of the front of the mouth, each with five rake-like limbs and a row of forward hook-like spines on top. Mankind's oldest ancestors trembled under the sharp teeth of this animal and fled!
This creature with overhead armor is very similar to the Cambrian shrimp discovered in 2019, but the Cambrian shrimp is small, usually only 30 cm, and the carapace on the back is distributed in a scaly manner.
Cambrian shrimp
During the boom period of the Cambrian explosion of life, new species evolved and diversified at an unparalleled pace, such as grotesque insects, micro-wattle insects covered with carapace-like scales and rows of thorns, walking cacti cacti cactus dianworms... However, the vast majority of animals of this period were short in size, only about the length of a human finger. Therefore, under such conditions, the titanic colony shrimp with a body length of half a meter is considered to be outstanding. In addition, the odd shrimp with a body length of 1 m was the largest predator in the Cambrian period.
Grotesque worms
Micro-wattle worms
Cactus dian insect
But the odd shrimp is not a habitat, but cruises in the middle and lower layers of the ocean. A pair of sharp sickle-shaped double pliers of the odd shrimp is specially designed to grasp prey. In contrast, the Titano Kori shrimp, which has a broad flat hard shell on the back of its head, evolved specifically for seafloor predation. The strong vertebral apex on its head allows it to pass through marine sediments, while the comb-like structure on its claws sweeps prey towards its rounded mouth. The discovery of such large seafloor predators means that large radially carnivores from the Cambrian period also hunted on the seabed.
Odd shrimp
The Cambrian explosion of life produced a number of animals with hard shells or endoskeletons, although Cambrian animals formed fossils easily compared to previous molluscs. But when the organism dies, the body is too late to bury, and the body decays, making it impossible to form fossils. Smaller creatures are easier to bury, and large bodies are relatively difficult to preserve into fossils, so large-scale predation in the Cambrian period is very rare, and the corner we glimpse from the fossils is not enough to show that magnificent era, the Cambrian ocean half a billion years ago, far more wonderful than the world that humans see from the fossils.
Reference: 1.https://phys.org/news/2021-09-massive-animal-species-half-billion-year-old-burgess.html
2.https://phys.org/news/2019-07-voracious-cambrian-predator-cambroraster-species.html