“Swimming Chief” was the king of the sea 500 million years ago: study

The killer whale seems to be the king of the ocean today, but in prehistory this title passed to a “swimming leader”.

This is according to paleontologists at the Royal Ontario Museum of Canada who recently discovered a giant relative of the railroad in the 500-million-year-old Burgess Shale shale in British Columbia, according to CBS News.

The newly discovered species is known as “Titanokorys gainesi” and measured 19.7 inches at a time when most organisms living in the ocean were barely the size of a pink finger.

“The size of this animal is absolutely amazing, this is one of the largest animals of the Cambrian period ever found,” said Jean-Bernard Caron, the museum’s invertebrate paleontology curator Richard M. Ivey and associate professor at the University of Toronto, said in a Press release promoting discovery.

According to the statement, the Titanokorys belong to a group of primitive arthropods called radiodonts, which “had multifaceted eyes, a pineapple-shaped mouth, lined with teeth, a pair of prickly claws below the head to catch prey. and a body with a series of flaps for swimming. “

The creature’s head is “so long in relation to the body that these animals are really little more than swimming heads,” said Joe Moysiuk, a doctor. In the statement, he noted a student of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Toronto who co-authored the study.

Investigators are still trying to find out why the creature’s head was so big, but speculate it was an adaptation to help it live near the seabed, according to CNN.

“Their limbs at the front looked like several stacked rakes and they would have been very efficient at bringing to their mouths everything they caught in their little thorns. The huge dorsal hood could have worked like a plow,” he said. the co-author of the study, Jean-Bernard Caron, told CNN.

Fossils will be exposed to the Royal Ontario Museum from December.