• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

500-Million-Year-Old “Taco” Arthropod Is A Hunter With A Trident Tooth

July 25, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Five hundred million years ago, the Earth was a whole lot of sea. Underwater, the Cambrian Explosion was bringing a flurry of differentiation that laid the foundations for modern animal phyla. The new creatures were not just multicellular blobs, but had many of the distinguishing features of animals today: eyes, legs, shells, and mandibles. One of these creatures appears to have been not only a pioneer in body shape, but also in lifestyle. It has been called a submarine and a taco, but its name is Odaraia alata.

Odaraia had been first found 100 years ago in the Burgess Shale, a rich fossil deposit in the Canadian Rockies. It contains some of the oldest fossils of soft body parts (500 million years old!), providing many insights into what the Cambrian world looked like.

Most Cambrian animals were part of the benthos, the ecosystem of the seafloor, but Odaraia with its 20-centimeter (7.9-inch) long body may already have been swimming up the water column – to hunt. By studying 150 fossils of Odaraia, Alejandro Izquierdo-López and Jean-Bernard Caron could create a detailed reconstruction of what this arthropod would have looked like, and how it probably fed.

“The head shield of Odaraia envelops practically half of its body including its legs, almost as if it were encased in a tube,” said lead author Izquierdo-López in a statement. Its taco-like appearance is only one of the remarkable features of Odaraia. Of particular interest to the researchers are its mandibles and the many spines along its body.

black and white photo of an Odaraia fossil

In this fossil, Odaraia reveals her taco shell.

Image credit: photo by Jean-Bernard Caron, Royal Ontario Museum.

Mandibles are ubiquitous in the world today, with almost half of all species having them, but they were a rarity in the Cambrian. The mandibles of Odaraia appear lined with teeth, and with divots for the muscles to attach and control them. This evidence secures Odaraia a spot among the pioneers of this body part.

Even more useful in prey-capture than the mandibles are the spines. Along the length of the body of Odaraia, the researchers found 30 sets of legs with small spines that could have created a mesh to capture prey with. This suggests that Odaraia could have been a suspension feeder, capturing prey similar to mesozooplankton in the net of its spines and then moving it to its mouth.

Advertisement

Oh, and they also found that Odaraia had a tooth shaped like a trident at its mouth opening. They suggest this resembles a gastric tooth, which amazingly is a tooth that lobster and crabs have inside their stomachs.

The authors highlight “the role of recovering anatomical information to improve ecological reconstructions”.

This study is published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Cricket-NZ players reach Dubai after ‘specific, credible threat’ derailed Pakistan tour
  2. Soccer-Liverpool’s Alexander-Arnold ruled out of Man City game
  3. What Are Baby Platypuses Called?
  4. Should You Wash Chicken Before Cooking It?

Source Link: 500-Million-Year-Old "Taco" Arthropod Is A Hunter With A Trident Tooth

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version