PhysOrg has another delightful story about prehistoric invertebrates. This time, researchers have discovered a half-a-billion-year-old enormous predator worm from the icy reaches of Northern Greenland:
The new fossil animals have been named Timorebestia, meaning ‘terror beasts’ in Latin. Adorned with fins down the sides of their body, a distinct head with long antennae, massive jaw structures inside their mouth, and growing to more than 30cm in length, these were some of the largest swimming animals in the Early Cambrian times.
“We have previously known that primitive arthropods were the dominant predators during the Cambrian, such as the bizarre-looking anomalocaridids,” said Dr. Jakob Vinther from the University of Bristol’s Schools of Earth Sciences and Biological Sciences, a senior author on the study. “However, Timorebestia is a distant, but close, relative of living arrow worms, or chaetognaths. These are much smaller ocean predators today that feed on tiny zooplankton.”
“Our research shows that these ancient ocean ecosystems were fairly complex, with a food chain that allowed for several tiers of predators.”
“Timorebestia were giants of their day and would have been close to the top of the food chain. That makes it equivalent in importance to some of the top carnivores in modern oceans, such as sharks and seals back in the Cambrian period.”
Inside the fossilized digestive system of Timorebestia, the researchers found remains of a common, swimming arthropod called Isoxys. “We can see these arthropods were a food source for many other animals,” said Morten Lunde Nielsen, a former Ph.D. student at Bristol and part of the current study.
—
You can read more about the jawed “terror beast” 30-cm-long worms here, in Science Advances.
[via Premee Mohamed’s Bluesky]