Many bizarre species are living on Earth, and some of them date back more than anybody thought possible. One such creature is a newfound animal that lived long before dinosaurs got extinct. According to CNET.com, the newfound organism in question is Titanokorys gainesi, meaning a predatory arthropod that measures almost half a meter.
Titanokorys gainesi isn’t spectacular only for its longevity. The creature is also one of the biggest animals dating back to the Cambrian period. The fossils of the organism were found in the Kootenay National Park of the Canadian Rockies.
“An incredibly long head”
Ph.D. student Joe Moysiuk from the University of Toronto explained more about the newfound creature, as quoted by CNET.com:
Titanokorys is part of a subgroup of radiodonts, called hurdiids, characterized by an incredibly long head covered by a three-part carapace that took on myriad shapes. The head is so long relative to the body that these animals are really little more than swimming heads.
SciTech Daily even has some compelling footage about how the creature looks:
Jean-Bernard Caron, an associate professor in evolutionary biology and ecology, said as also cited by CNET.com:
Their limbs at the front looked like multiple stacked rakes and would have been very efficient at bringing anything they captured in their tiny spines towards the mouth. The huge dorsal carapace might have functioned like a plough.
The Cambrian Period was the first geological period from the Paleozoic Era and also of the Phanerozoic Eon. It lasted roughly 55 million years from the end of the Ediacaran Period 541 million years ago and to the beginning of the Ordovician Period 485.4 mya. The Cambrian Period also belongs to the Paleozoic Era, meaning the earliest of three geologic eras from the Phanerozoic Eon.
