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About 506 million years ago, a predator swept the silt floors of the Cambrian ocean. Rakelike feed arms sifted through the mud it had raised and guided the soft-bodied worms into a constricting, round mouth.
In 2018, a team of paleontologists from the Royal Ontario Museum discovered the preserved shell of this ancient predator while on a fossil hunting trip in the Canadian Rockies. Open Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science., The team identified the 19-inch animal, which they named Titanokorys gainesi, as one of the earliest known large predators on earth.
Ph.D. “At a time when most animals were the size of your little finger, this would have been a very large predator and would probably have been near the top of the food chain,” said Joe Moysiuk. University of Toronto student and co-author of the study.
Titanocorys belonged to a time when the first recognizable ecosystems were taking shape. More than half a billion years ago, the quiet gardens of the Ediacaran – populated largely by soft-bodied organisms that feed on microbial mats – disappeared. As the first predators evolved, ecosystems became more complex, and many of the large animal groups still alive today appeared for the first time: a geological cycle called the “Cambrian explosion.”
In 1909, the first evidence of this change was uncovered at the Burgess Shale in the Canadian Rockies by Charles Walcott, an American paleontologist. Examining the fine-grained sediments there, the researchers found soft-bodied traces of a wild – albeit small – zoo. There were Lovecraftian animals, as well as the first ancestors of early arthropods and vertebrates, such as trilobites. Opabinia and hallucination, unlike anything known today.
The primary carnivores of this ecosystem were an extinct family of arthropods called radiodons because of their toothy, circular jaws. The largest and most iconic of the family, anomalyIt was a three-metre apex predator with a streamlined hull and fluttering paddles that helped it traverse open water.
Jean-Bernard Caron, curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Royal Ontario Museum, said Anomalocaris was the only known large predator from the Burgess Shale for decades. But in 2014, while he and his colleagues were collecting it from a new quarry in British Columbia’s Kootenay National Park, they began to find the remains of a mysterious new animal. Four years later, a shell the size of a full “football helmet” surfaced.
Dr. “It was absolutely mind-blowing,” Caron said. “A fossil like this is very rare. It took a while for us to put everything together, but it gave us our first understanding of this animal – it allowed us to show that there are other large predators in this community.”
Although related to Anomalocaris, Titanocorys He was a different hunter. Sharing the lobed swimming paddles of its larger relative, the broad head shell – Mr Moysiuk calls it “spaceship-shaped” – covered half its body length. It had jointed claws and backward, upward-facing eyes, suggesting it spent most of its time on the seafloor. It probably lived like a modern stingray or horseshoe crab, sifting through the muddy bottom.
The finding also shows that Cambrian ecosystems were more complex than previously thought. The same quarry that produced Titanocorys also produced another radiodont called Cambroraster, a much smaller species with a differently shaped shell but similar claws.
Dr. “It was a bit of a surprise to find two predators exploiting the same seafloor community but with different shells,” Caron said. But such a wide range of predators in the Cambrian indicates that the seas had sufficient resources for multiple different types of predators to coexist.
Predation may have been a major driver of biodiversity as species began to enter an evolutionary feedback loop between predator and prey. As the prey developed stronger armor, the hunters responded with stronger jaws; both hunter and prey needed better eyes. “The concept of an arms race in evolution is becoming increasingly important,” said Mr Moysiuk, and early predators may have been vital to the development of the intricate, complex ecosystems we know today.
Dr. The find also highlights how much remains to be learned about the Cambrian, Caron said. “Every time we switch sites, we find different species,” he said. “We just scraped the surface of these mountains.”
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