Imagine a creature shaped somewhat like a toilet brush scuttling along the seafloor around 500 million years ago, near what is now southwestern China.
Now picture that toilet brush with eyes bobbing on stalks; a pair of spike-lined armlike appendages; and a tail fan with long, sweeping blades, and you'll have a pretty good image of a newly described animal weirdo that lived during the Cambrian period .
The juvenile individual measured nearly 6 inches long and about 2 inches wide, and belongs to a group of extinct ocean-dwelling ancestral arthropods called radiodonts, researchers reported Sept. 7 in theInitially, researchers identified the oddball animal as a previously known radiodont species. Though radiodonts have similar body plans, species"are distinguished mainly by their diverse forms of raptorial appendages," and those of the fossil were so unique that researchers determined it was not only a new species but a previously unknown genus, Zeng told Live Science in an email.
"Their appearance in the ~520 million-years-ago early Cambrian indicated the formation of complex food webs and marine ecosystems," he explained.
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