Many of the creatures that survive in the seas half a billion eld ago were far too voiced to result behind many fossils . But their footprints remain , and one of the most salient discovery is a elephantine , predatory sea millipede .
Our best windowpane into the Cambrian Period of 500 million years ago is the Burgess Shale , a vast stone establishment bump in British Columbia that support many fossils dating back to this ancient aeon . While paleontologists have found passel of fogey in the Burgess Shale , these lay out only the tiniest fraction of all the ocean life from the Welsh Period , most of which had cushy dead body that do n’t easily fossilize . But the Burgess Shale also holds grounds of ancient trails and burrows created by the organisms of the Cambrian catamenia .
One such trackway holds the effective evidence yet of an unusual vulture : Tegopelte gigas . This ancient animate being was somewhere between a caterpillar and a millipede , lark about a piano carapace on its back and 33 duet of legs . The creature could pass on well over a ft long , which by Cambrian standards was positively gigantic . researcher at the University of Saskatchewan and Royal Ontario Museum knew T. gigas had create this particular trail – the step of a 66 - legged creature are passably much evident .
What ’s more , this fresh find actually break the home of this gargantuan millipede in the Cambrian intellectual nourishment chain . The trackway reveals that the creature actuate rapidly over the seafloor , with its legs only ever shortly touching the sediment . The researchers say that a creature like this would only take such rapid movement if it was an apex predator that ask to quickly close up in on its target . This entail it was a competitor to the Welsh ’s swimming predator , and its presence would have gone a long style towards shaping the maritime ecosystem and how the coinage within it evolved .
ViaProceedings of the Royal Society . Artist ’s impression by Marianne Collins .
BiologyFossilPaleontologyPredatorScience
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