In its centennial year , Burgess shale has added one more wonderful chapter to the history of life on Earth. A team of Paleontologists from Canada,UK and Sweden has discovered a new animal from Cambrian age ,which was lying in the fossil collection of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) for many years. The group has published a description of the 500-million-year-old Hurdia victoria the new issue of Science journal based on the several specimens from the Burgess Shale.
Hurdia victoria was an underwater predator with segmented body ,a general body architecture similar to those of Anomalocaris and Laggania. It had a pair of claws and a circular mouth with several layers of overlapping teeth and the thing which separates Hurdia from rest was a hard carapace that jutted out from its head, the function of which remains something of a mystery. The hurdia victoria ranged in size from that of a large shrimp to double that length and, with eyes to see and teeth to shred its prey, it would have dominated the food chain in a period when all animal life was underwater.

Discovered for the first time in 1912 ,as a crustacean-like animal and now with efforts from an international team proves it to be just one part of a complex and remarkable new animal.This new reconstruction has a very important story to tell about the origin of the largest group of living animals, the arthropods. Not realizing the other parts of the same animal also in collection,scientists always described these fragments independently as jellyfish, sea cucumbers and other arthropods.This was also the case with the discovery of Anomalocaris ,when Joseph Frederick Whiteaves in 1892 ,for the first time described Anomalocaris as a separate crustacean-like creature due to its resemblance to the tail of a lobster or shrimp ,It continued to mislead palaeontologists till the puzzle was many years later.

Thanks to many expeditions since 1990 uncovering more complete specimens and hundreds of isolated pieces that led to the first hints that Hurdia was more than it seemed. The last piece of the puzzle was found when the best-preserved specimen turned up in the old collections at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington DC. The new description of Hurdia shows that it is indeed related to Anomalocaris,sharing segmented body with a head bearing a pair of spinous claws and a circular jaw structure with many teeth. However Hurdia differs from Anomalocaris by the possession of a huge three-part carapace that projects out from the front of the animal’s head,which is quite unique for an living or extinct arthropod. Most of the body is covered in the gills, which were probably necessary to provide oxygen to such a large, actively swimming animal.These features amplify and clarify the diversity of known anomalocaridid morphology and provide insight into the origins of important arthropod features, such as the head shield and respiratory exites.

Journal reference:
The Burgess Shale anomalocaridid Hurdia and its significance for early euarthropod evolution.
Daley AC, Budd GE, Caron JB, Edgecombe GD, Collins D.
Science. 2009 Mar 20;323(5921):1597-600.

Image Credit:
FlickR / Goniagnostus

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