When Giant 'Shrimps' Ruled the Earth

the life that once inhabited this planet never ceases to be weird all throughout the history of life there have been incredible forms of organisms that appear to push the limits of our own imaginations and understandings and arguably some of the most fantastic of these creatures are the anomaly currents dominating the food chains of the Cambrian period some of these animals were the first true super predators that we know of preying on almost anything that was unlucky enough to be in their way the anomaly cards were absolute giants for their time approaching lengths of 1 meter or more which although it might not seem particularly large to us now would have completely dwarfed the other organisms alive at the same time as these predators normally cards were incredibly strange animals as their name suggests and they're unusual Anatomy and preservation concealed their true identity until almost 100 years after the first fossils were discovered these initial fossils were described by paleontologist in the Year 1892 but they were not recognized as belonging to an animal occurred at the time because of the softest structure of the main body of nominal currents these creatures disintegrated very easily after they died leaving only the harder parts to become fossilized in most cases this means that their front appendages and mouth are more commonly fossilized than their whole bodies and so the first part of these animals to be found looked very unusual without the context of the rest of the animal the fossils examined in 1892 were the preserved remains of the hard front grasping appendages that the scientists who described them thought they looked like shrimp bodies he named these strange shrimp anomalocaris which means well strange shrimp that explains the name of the video by the way the next time that fossils of anomalocaris were described was in 1911 but this time it was a mouth part without the context of the complete creature once again this mouth part that's just as strange as the front appendages and it was therefore thought to be a new species of jellyfish it was given the name Pei Toya and classified as an ancient jellyfish relative then the body of a nama chorus with his mouth attached was described but it was interpreted as a sea sponge and given the name lagana and then in 1978 a scientists re-examined this specimen but decided that it was actually the jellyfish Pei Toya on top of the sea sponge lagana so there were now three different species named from parts that all the and to one animal this confusing mess finally started to be cleared up in the early 1980s when a scientist was preparing a specimen by clearing away the surrounding rock he soon discovered that this specimen showed two of the anomalocaris shrimp attached to her heads that also included the pate or jellyfish other specimens that were prepared also ended up showing this arrangement and so the mystery of these creatures identity was solved instead of being several small animals they were all parts of a much much bigger super predator so once the overall body shape of anomalocaris had been resolved this allowed paleontologists to make some interesting discoveries about their more detailed Anatomy and what this means for how they behaved when they once stalks the prehistoric oceans of the Cambrian let's look at a normal course in particular the first anomaly Corot to be named this animal possessed a very odd-looking body plan with about eleven flexible lobes projecting from the side of his body but enabled it a swim a large head that supported the frontal appendages and mouth and a tail fan at the other end of its body the lobes that projected from anomalocaris grew in a way so that each one would slope underneath the one behind it creating the effect of a single flexible wing on each side of the body these wings would have undulated in a wave-like motion an unusual looking style of movement however a life-sized working model of anomalocaris was actually made in the 90s and was able to illustrate how this method of moving through water provided a very effective stability that would not have needed a great deal of brainpower to maintain so anomaly cards were good swimmers and would not have needed complex brains in order to propel themselves or control their stability this efficient method of locomotion was therefore able to drive the large head of a normal chorus as it went in search of prey and UNAM Lycoris was certainly good at searching the fossilized remains of this animals eyes were discovered a few years ago and they revealed that it would have had extremely good vision possessing over 16,000 lenses in its compound eyes this gave anomalocaris a very high resolution and therefore a huge advantage over the other animals alive at the time which would not have had vision anywhere near this good this level of vision along with the anatomy of its font of appendages and mouth parts give us some interesting insights into the lifestyle of these incredible animals ever since anomalocaris true identity was revealed it has been assumed that it was a huge carnival that devoured anything it could get his appendages on the acute vision it possessed along with the spines on the appendages and in the mouth part do indeed support this predatory lifestyle however there seems to be one kind of animal that may have been able to escape becoming food for these giants Trotta bites these hard shelled arthropods they were abundant in the Cambrian seas may have proven to be somewhat of a challenge for number cards to feed on there is evidence to suggest that trata bites were preyed on by a normal carrots such as fossil trilobite showing w-shaped bite marks and large fossilized feces quite possibly belonging to an anomaly carrot that contained fragments of trilobite shells however some paleontologists doubt that the soft-bodied anomaly cards would have been capable of breaking into a hard shelled mineralized trilobite however it's possible that certain species of anomalocaris could have used the front of appendages to manipulate a trilobite that had been court rapidly flexing his body in order to exploit weaknesses in the exoskeleton this movement could then have split up in the shell of the trilobite and provided access to the soft insights whether or not some species of animal carrots did prey on hard shelled organisms such as trata bites what is certain is that different species were adapted to some very different feeding strategies the normal chorus in particular seems to have been well suited to a method of using as long spiked appendages to grasp prey from the seafloor with some species possibly being capable of targeting hard shelled creatures but all of them being very able to prey on the weird soft bodied animals of the Cambrian such as Hallucigenia and way waxy a-- but in contrast this idea of a deadly super predator capable of ripping apart trilobites is that some kinds of an omelet carrots were actually filter feeders like today's baleen whales there is an anomaly current called Thomas Eucharist that possessed long thin spines on his appendage that form a kind of net structure this net could have been swept through the sea filtering out plankton and other small organisms that would then be consumed by the anomaly current this very different style of feeding just goes to show how diverse and interesting these animals were and is pretty incredible to realize that filter feeding had already evolved all those millions of years ago in the in period interestingly a filter feeding animal card was actually predicted years before their species was discovered - a filter fed a 2013 book called all your yesterday's featured numerous illustrations of speculative behavior and anatomy of various prayers Doric creatures and one such speculative work was a filter feeding a normal carrot which had not been discovered at that point and then just a year after the book came out the study that showed to Monsieur Karos to be a filter feeder was published so now we've looked at what these creatures look like and how they probably live but what exactly were they how do they fit in with the rest of the Tree of Life let's start with the small groups then work our way back through the branches on the tree to figure out exactly what kind of animals these incredible creatures were beginning with anomalocaris itself the type species of this genus is part of a group known as a normal occurrence which itself is a part of the larger group of a normal occurrence within normal Accords there are several other groupings that include the rest of the anomaly card species the main ones are the amplitude below it's the CTO carrots the her deeds and of course the anomaly corridors the amplitude Balu words include animals such as AMP Lecter bluer and lovara packs both creatures are known from fossils found in China and one of the species of amplitude below a-- is also known from the canadian burgess shale it also seems as though unplucked of beluga was perhaps adapted for grasping pray with us appendages similar to the way that a normal car is hunted the next group the c2 accords includes the filter feeding UNAM occurrence and this is the group that the previously mentioned Thomas Eucharist belongs to the long spines on the appendages with small spines jutting out from them are the characteristics that define this group and hint at their filter feeding behavior for names sitio card is itself a reference to the entry in all your yesterday's the first put forward the idea of such creatures the other family are the herd Ian's which includes a wide variety of species one of these species is pay toya which is actually an animal carrot even though the name was originally used for the jellyfish that was involved in the confusion of fossils that turned out to be the first animal chorus interestingly this animal may also have been a filter feeding an armored car as it possessed long spines on the appendages similar to those seen into Monsieur Karos also included in the herds as the German species gender hands which was a very important discovery since it indicated that anomalocaris had actually survived for far longer than previously thought before this animal was found anomaly cards were only known from the Cambrian period but this species lived during the early devonian about 100 million years later than other enormocorp at species there's also her deer for which the group is named a fairly unusual looking creature compared to most other animal Accords since it has a large shell structure protruding from its head it's still unclear what exactly this structure was used for but it was probably not for defense as the carapace was hollow however it could perhaps have been used to disturb sediment on the sea floor and dislodged potential prey items that would then be trapped underneath the structure and eaten so that's the anomalocaris as a whole but where does this group fit into the larger evolutionary tree anomaly chords are a member of a group known as Dino corrida de which also includes another very weird looking animal called opa binya da no corrida de means terror crap because of the enormocorp odds and OPA Phineas oval crustacean appearance despite them not actually being crustaceans and also because they would have been absolutely terrifying to the other organisms alive at the time the Dino carry dads are themselves a part of an even larger group known as the pan arthropods which is an association of animals that includes the entire arthropod group as well as the onika forums or velvet worms and tardigrades which are more commonly known as water bears the pan arthropods are obviously a very large group including many species still alive today as well as a lot of extinct lineages this is probably as far back through the tree as we need to go to see where anomaly cards fit in as the fact that they are pan arthropods shows us they are closely related to some of the most basal arthropod ancestors so to put it as simply as possible and normal cards are stem arthropods products of a primitive lineage that share a common ancestor with the other Pods they possess some features that suggest our affinity with this group but also have characteristics that differentiate them from arthropods leading paleontologists to place them as stem arthropods as I've already briefly mentioned and the cards actually survived from much longer than was previously realized and did not fall victim to the mass extinction at the end of the Cambrian period instead they made it into much later periods such as the Ordovician and even the Devonian as is indicated by fossilized at normal carats found from these times in Earth's history this just goes to show how incredible these animals were and stands as a testament to the success the group had during their time on earth I hope this video has been able to give you a clearer idea of what these creatures were as well as how they lived and evolved I would encourage you to read even more into these animals if you are interested as there's a lot of specifics on each species that I didn't cover here and so much more to discover about this wonderful group of organisms and the time in which they lived the anomaly cards are definitely one of my favorite groups of animals that have ever lived and hopefully I've been able to pass on my fascination with them through this video thank you so much for watching I really hope you enjoyed this and learn something new if you would like to learn more about our world its history and the wonderful life that surrounds us all please feel free to subscribe to the channel if you think we deserve it and if you would like to see more from us

Channel: Ben G Thomas

Views: 178,439

Rating: 4.9404984 out of 5

Keywords: Biology, Science, Paleontology, Palaeontology, Dinosaurs, Animals, Nature, Wildlife, Ben, Thomas, Prehistory, Anatomy, Fossil, Bones

Id: M4_nK9STouE

Length: 12min 20sec (740 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 11 2018