Extemporaneous and disproportionate

2011/07/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Paleontologia
• Zoologia
• Arkeologia

The fossil of a creature in the form of prawns is discovered in the sediments of the time when this animal was considered missing

Two paleontologists from the University of Yale have found a copy of a group of animals allegedly disappeared in the mass extinction of the Cambrian in the sediments of the post-extinction period, the Ordovician. It is a creature in the form of prawns belonging to the group anomalocarididae. As previously believed, these animals appeared in the Cranian Explosion, about 500 million years ago, and 488 million years ago disappeared, in a massive disappearance of the late Cambrian.

Scientists have also found that it was much larger than the rest of the animals in the Anomalocarididae group. The finding of the animal without head is more than one meter, double that of the family members of the Cambrian era and triple that the rest of fossils found in the same sediment. The finding has been made known in the journal Nature.