HALF A BILLION years old ancestors of arthropods found

I just love evolution - if that's possible at all to love a definition. 
But evolution is amazing! Think of all the endless possibilities of life there already has been, the ones that's here now and the ones that will come in the distant future. It really makes my head spin... 

Io9.com just featured this amazing article about these HALF A BILLION years old ancestors of spiders, shrimp and other arthropods. Or possible ancestors at least, since a lot of stuff happens during 500 mio. years. 

Anyone for squidditch? 

Anomalocarids - as they're called - are one of the oldest families of animals on Earth, and they truly looked like something thought up by the combined spawn of H.P.Lovecraft and H.R.Giger. 

From the io9 article:

The connection between anomalocarids and today's animals has long been a source of debate, and some paleontologists believed that there was no way to classify them properly. But thanks to Cong and his team, we have some strong evidence that arthropods — a group containing spiders, crabs, scorpions, and centipedes — are the distant descendants of these anomalocarids.A team of paleontologists led by Peiyun Cong found three gorgeously-preserved anomalocarid fossils in Yunnan Province, and described them today in Nature.

 The main overlap between the two groups, separated by 500 million years of evolution, is their brain structure. Arthropods have segmented, compartmentalized heads like anomalocarids. Plus, their brains connect to those "front appendages" which are called mouth flaps or antennae in today's arthropods. So both groups of creatures shared a very specific physical characteristic, which was a connection between those appendages and the brain.

-Illustration by Nicholas Strausfeld

And above, you can see a side-by-side comparison of one of the fossils (gray) witha a modern arthropod called an onychophoran or velvet worm (green). Long nerves from the frontal appendages extend to paired ganglia lying in front of the optic nerve and connect to the main brain mass in front of the mouth. Anomalocaridids had a pair of clawlike grasping appendages instead of feelers.
New fossil discovery of Anomalocarids actually contains traces of their brain structure — and amazingly, their half-billion-year-old brains look a lot like an arthropod's. Though some anomalocarids may have been as big as 7 feet long, these newly-discovered specimens are closer to the size of today's large insects.

Free Willyanomalocarid!!!!

If you found this interesting, you just might like my post on the origins of life on Earth too.

So just think about all the marvelous alien life there might be out there, beyond the deep, dark and dead vacuum of space, when you see what's been going on this tiny rock. 



Read the article at i09 here.
Read the full paper at Nature.