Artistic reconstruction of Habelia optata on the Cambrian seafloor. Habelia is thought to have been an active predator, eating small animals with hard carapaces, such as trilobites. (Joanna Liang/Royal Ontario Museum)
CBC has an article with new information about a Cambrian predator. The animal, Habelia optata, lived about 508 million years ago. It now appears that it is a relative of spiders and scorpions say researchers from the Royal Ontario Museum and the University of Toronto. Fossil specimens of Habelia were first collected in 1912 in the Burgess Shale by Charles Walcott. The original paper was published in BMC Evolutionary Biology.
"If you're looking for a scary Hollywood creature, it probably would be the perfect one," said Cédric Aria, lead author of the study published this week in BMC Evolutionary Biology. "It's like a centipede or perhaps an insect that would have not one pair of mandibles, but five."
Each of those powerful pairs of jaws was equipped with sharp teeth and designed to crush the protective shells of its prey, likely small trilobites. In fact, a similar fossil predator was recently found in Australia with chopped up trilobite remains in its gut, said Aria, who studied Habelia during his PhD at the University of Toronto and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology in China.
