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An international team of archaeologists <a style="background-color: transparent;" href="http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/11/8191763/yale-nature-study-giant-lobster-aegirocassis-benmoulae"> has discovered</a> a giant inhabitant of Earth's primeval oceans that would have dwarfed all others.
Aegirocassis benmoulae was a two-metre-long lobster-like sea creature, which had a long segmented body and flaps on its bellt that it used to get around.
Other than its enormous bulk, relative to other creatures at the time, its most recognisable feature was probably a net-like appendage that it dragged through the water to collect the plankton it consumed.
For a long time, fossils of the creature were thought to have been several different animals. Their appendages were thought to be shrimp, their mouths jellyfish and their bodies sea cucumbers.
But between 1985 and 2011, researchers figured out that it was actually one creature. Initially it was thought to be a predatory animal, like many of its evolutionary relatives. But that changed when Moroccan fossil collector Ben Moula, who the creature is now named after, discovered a very well-preserved filter-feeding system.
What all this means, in additional to being an interesting glimpse at a monster of the ancient seas, is that we now have the oldest evidence yet of predatory species undergoing an evolutionary shift to filtering plankton. Sharks and whales did the same thing much later on, and it's thought that crocodiles may have done so too -- reaching massive sizes.
The fin-like swimming appendages on the belly of
Aegirocassis benmoulae have now also been spotted on its evolutionary relatives, which were previously thought to lack limbs entirely. If it weren't for this discovery archaeologists might not have spotted them. "When I discovered these flaps, the implications for the evolution of limbs. I thought 'jeez, is this really true?,'" said Peter Van Roy, who co-authored the study, in an interview with The Verge. "And so for weeks, I went back to the fossils every day just to make sure that 'yes the flaps are there, I'm not being crazy, I'm not seeing things.'"
Van Roy says that he's planning to move on to other types of arthropods next, but believes there is much still to be learnt from the group of anomalocaridids that contains Aegirocassis benmoulae. He and his team published their findings in Nature.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
