Anomalocaris
node
A Cambrian predatory arthropod relative reaching perhaps half a metre or more, with a pair of large grasping frontal appendages, a circular plated mouth, stalked compound eyes and lateral swimming flaps. Its interest here is less zoological than historical, because it is the clearest demonstration in palaeontology of how easily disarticulated evidence misleads. Its parts entered the literature separately over decades and were each described as a different animal: the frontal appendage as a shrimp-like crustacean, from which the name Anomalocaris — "odd shrimp" — derives, the circular mouth as a jellyfish, and the body as a sponge. Only in the Cambridge re-study of the Burgess material were the pieces recognised as one organism, and the reconstruction has continued to change since. Anomalocaris also settles a question about Cambrian ecology: it is a large, mobile, visually guided predator, which means that by roughly 508 million years ago marine food webs already had several trophic levels rather than a flat mat-grazing structure.
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Timeline
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Connections · 1
- The Cambrian explosionevidence_for
Assembled narrative · 1
Assembled from 26 blocks · 1 evidence · 19 related
- Story
- A Cambrian predatory arthropod relative reaching perhaps half a metre or more, with a pair of large grasping frontal appendages, a circular plated mouth, stalked compound eyes and lateral swimming flaps. Its interest here is less zoological than historical, because it is the clearest demonstration in palaeontology of how easily disarticulated evidence misleads. Its parts entered the literature separately over decades and were each described as a different animal: the frontal appendage as a shrimp-like crustacean, from which the name Anomalocaris — "odd shrimp" — derives, the circular mouth as a jellyfish, and the body as a sponge. Only in the Cambridge re-study of the Burgess material were the pieces recognised as one organism, and the reconstruction has continued to change since. Anomalocaris also settles a question about Cambrian ecology: it is a large, mobile, visually guided predator, which means that by roughly 508 million years ago marine food webs already had several trophic levels rather than a flat mat-grazing structure.
- Knowledge
- Anomalocaris
- The Cambrian explosion
- Connections
- The Cambrian explosion
- The Cambrian explosion
- The Cambridge re-description of the Burgess fauna begins
- Molecular clock dating
- Ediacara Hills, Flinders Ranges
- Fortune Head GSSP, Newfoundland
- Konservat-Lagerstätte (exceptional preservation)
- Burgess Shale, Yoho National Park
- Anomalocaris
- Chengjiang fossil site, Yunnan
- The Great Oxidation Event
- The end-Ordovician mass extinction
- Fortune Head GSSP, Newfoundland
- Burgess Shale, Yoho National Park
- Chengjiang fossil site, Yunnan
- Anomalocaris
- Konservat-Lagerstätte (exceptional preservation)
- Molecular clock dating
- Evidence
- Supports the narrative of Walcott's discovery and classification, the Whittington–Briggs–Conway Morris re-description, and the reassembly of Anomalocaris from three separately named fossils. Gould's own thesis about disparity and contingency is a contested interpretation and is not asserted as fact in this pack. V55 verification basis: this session had no network access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked and the WebSearch budget was exhausted — so the cited work was not retrieved and its pagination was not re-checked.
Observed changes · 0
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/atlas?object=SPECIES_ANOMALOCARIS&experience=SPECIES_ANOMALOCARIS