Rock Star: Astonishing 500-Million-Year_old Fossil Unearthed

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Published at : September 14, 2021

When related animals were barely the length of a human pinky finger, Titanokory gainesi was at least 20 inches (500 centimeters) long and lived in the seas of the Cambrian Age.

Paleontologists at the Royal Ontario Museum discovered a fossil of the giant new species in rocks a half-a-billion years old of the Burgess Shale area in the Kootenay National Park, British Columbia, in the Canadian Rockies.

“The sheer size of this animal is absolutely mind-boggling. This is one of the biggest animals from the Cambrian Period ever found,” said Jean-Bernard Caron, the Royal Ontario Museum's curator of invertebrate paleontology and the co-author of the study published on Sept. 8 in Royal Society Open Science.

“Titanokorys is part of a subgroup of radiodonts, called hurdiids, characterized by an incredibly long head covered by a three-part carapace that took on myriad shapes," said co-author Joe Moysiuk, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. “The head is so long relative to the body that these animals are really little more than swimming heads.


Titanokorys belongs to a group including the streamlined predator Anomalocaris that may have reached just more than 3 feet (one meter) in length. Like other radiodonts, Titanokorys had an exoskeleton, multifaceted eyes, a tooth-lined circular mouth, spiny claws below its head to capture prey and flaps on its body for swimming the shallow seas.


Video Source: Lars Fields, Royal Ontario Museum


#PreHistoric #Animals Rock Star: Astonishing 500-Million-Year_old Fossil Unearthed
Star:Astonishing500-Million-Year_old