Life reconstruction of Lomankus edgecombei. Image credit: Xiaodong Wang.
SciNews has news of a new species of arthropod from the Ordovician Period. Lomankus edgecombei lived some 450 million years ago in what is now New York. This specimen was found at a fossil locality that includes the famous Beecher’s Trilobite Bed. That locality is known for equisite pyrite replacement fossils. The legs of trilobites were first seen in fossils from the site. Lomankus edgecombei was described in a paper in the journal Current Biology.
Lomankus edgecombei belongs to Megacheira, an iconic group of arthropods with a large, modified leg at the front of their bodies that was used to capture prey.
Megacheirans were very diverse during the Cambrian period (538-485 million years ago) but were thought to be largely extinct by the Ordovician period (485-443 million years ago).
The discovery of Lomankus edgecombei offers important new clues towards solving the long-standing riddle of how arthropods evolved the appendages on their heads: one or more pairs of legs at the front of their bodies modified for specialised functions like sensing the environment and capturing prey.
