Anomalocaris canadensis, which means "Abnormal Shrimp", is a genus of anomalocaridid, a family of animals thought to be closely related to ancestral arthropods. Commonly referred to as the very first super predator, Anomalocaris was around 3.3 feet long (massive for Cambrian animals) and swam by undulating its body much like a worm. In front of its small, disk-like mouth were a pair of "arms" covered in barbs that would've impaled prey before ferrying their bodies to the mouth. On the top of its head were a pair of 1.2 inch wide eyes, each having about 16000 lenses. They were the most powerful eyes of the time, with vision over 30 times sharper than the eyes of trilobites, which were once thought to have the best eyesight of the time. In fact, these eyes are only beaten out by modern dragonflies and damselflies, which have around 28000 lenses in each eye.
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· 5 years ago
Yooooooo Anomalocaris. It was called “abnormal shrimp” because they found one of the appendages in isolation, and because of the way it curved and the little tendrils on it, they thought it was a shrimp. It wasn’t until much later that they found the whole animal, but the name stuck due to taxonomical convention.
Theres an archetype called "paleozoics" which includes creatures like hallucigenia, canadia, pikaia, olenoides, opabinia, dinomichus, etc.
They're really fun too, check em out sometime
They're really fun too, check em out sometime