Because researchers found males and females, they concluded that they were seeing adults, even though they appeared to have many characteristics of an earlier life-stage. This would be like an adult human having the disproportionately large eyes of a baby, for example. The adults have characteristics similar to crab larvae.

“It is the earliest arthropod to evolve swimming oar-like legs since the sea scorpions disappeared more than 250 million years ago, a beautiful and perplexing chimera, as its name indicates.”īy comparing specimens of the new species with all known crab species, the team discovered several important unique characteristics of this species that sets it apart. “This baffling fossil is like the platypus of the crab world,” Luque said. Its large, oar-like legs are the oldest record of adaptations of crabs for swimming. Oppose to earlier theories, the platypuss evolutionary tree may be far more. It has large, unprotected compound eyes, a small body and mouthparts that look like legs. The platypus is a creature pertaining to an order of small egg-laying. According to the authors, this fossil crab’s unique body form pushes the textbook definition of what a crab is. Important pieces in the puzzle may be rare or yet to be discovered. vastly reduced due to loss of riparian trees (and the large woody debris they. Sometimes it is difficult to piece together the tree of life that maps the evolution of the animals seen today. n retained by the platypus but lost by other species over evolutionary.

Platypus evolution tree