Earth's First Great Predator Wasn't: Carnivorous 'Shrimp' Not So Fierce, 3-D Model Shows
ScienceDaily (Nov. 8, 2010) — The meters-long, carnivorous "shrimp" from hell that once ruled the seas of Earth a half billion years ago may have been a real softy, it turns out. A new 3-D modeling of the mouth parts of the Anomalocaris, along with evidence that these parts were not hard like teeth, but flexible, shows that the famed predator could not have been munching on the hard shells of trilobites and other such creatures of the early seas.
Researchers have developed A new 3-D modeling of the mouth parts of the Anomalocaris, a carnivorous shrimp-like creature that lived a half billion years ago. Left: model of the toothplate. Right: model of the mouth. (Credit: Image courtesy of Dr. James Hagadorn, Denver Museum of Nature & Science)
What's more, there is no evidence from fossilized stomach contents or feces that Anomalocaris' ate anything hard enough to leave a fossilized trace. In fact it was this lack of fossil evidence backing any dietary preference -- right alongside other animals that do show fragments of what they ate in their gullets -- which inspired the investigation, said paleontologist James "Whitey" Hagadorn of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.
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Hagadorn presented his team's discoveries about Anomalocaris on Nov. 1 at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver.
"It was supposed to roam around the Cambrian seas gobbling up trilobites and everything else," said Hagadorn. But the pineapple-like whorl of mouth parts and the associated whisker-like appendages of Anomalocaris all appear to have been bendable, in the fossil remains, he said. They are not mineralized like the exoskeletons of the trilobites they were supposedly eating.
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