Cool! I love those Cambrian and pre-Cambrian beasties. That's when evolution was really tripping out, trying anything and everything to get a competitive advantage. This latest find shows what the top predator of the time had for eyeballs. Just like a dragonfly, lots and lots of facets – the better to see you with. And it had sharp toothy bits as well, the better to eat you with! It probably tasted like lobster (a BIG lobster, seeing as it was a meter long).
Take a moment to think about what's going on with this find. This guy lived a half a billion years ago. 500 million years. And yet we're able to see what its eyes were like. Soft, squishy eyes that really don't like to stick around once an organism has died. No wonder I wanted to be a paleontologist in my youth.
Since Anomalocaris (which means "strange shrimp," btw) was the top predator of its time, I thought it'd be instructive to show him along with our own top dog, the Great White shark. What do you think? Is our super-predator scarier looking or does Anomalocaris win?
To read more about this puppy, visit this page from the University of Adelaide.
Seeing as sharks remain almost unchanged for quite a while and were dominant during that time (and still are), whereas shrimpy guy went extinct, one can conclude that the sharks have nearly flawless designs. I say, fear the perfect predator!
You’re being a bit harsh with your conclusion, imho. Several MAJOR extinction events in our earth’s history occurred after shrimp guy’s heyday. Tough for anything to have weathered those storms. All sharks had to do was weather the K-T extinction.
It’s true that I lack relevant knowledge to make the right assumptions. It’s also true that I’m friggin terrified of aquatic fauna in general; but hey, it’s a shrimp, and an extinct one at that. I can’t bring myself to fear something that has cute squishy bulbous eyes and died away long time ago.
I thought that I’d read or heard somewhere that good old anom and his ken had eyes made out of hard faceted crystal of some kind, which is why they preserve so nicely.