#mandibulates

[mckitterick]

Look at this cute Cambrian critter!

Balhuticaris belongs to a group of 500 million-year-old carapace-bearing arthropods known as hymenocarines. hymenocarines are probably early mandibulates, the group that contains crustaceans, myriapods, and insects. its eyes are bilobate, allowing Balhuticaris to calculate distances better than its kin

scale:

they even think it swam upside-down:

source tweet thread with link to published article:

[netmassimo]

An article published in the journal "Nature" describes the discovery of fossils of a species of marine arthropods that lived a little more than 500 million years ago in the Permian period. Calling Tokummia Katalepsis, this species is one of the many discovered in Burgess Shale and is important because according to Cédric Ariz and Jean-Bernard Caron of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) it shows the origin of mandibulates (Mandibulata), a group of arthropods that includes millipedes, crustaceans and insects.