Scientists find ancient crab with shrimp mouth, lobster shell, football-sized eyes

Scientists have recently come across a fossil of new ancient species type of crabs that lived in the dinosaur age and were basically an animal mashup – a mixture of shrimp, crab and a football.

A recent discovery of an ancient dinosaur-era crab fossil, named Callichimaera perplexa, baffled paleontologists who are already calling it the platypus, who are among nature’s most unlikely animals, of the crab world.

The name, which means perplexing beautiful chimera, refers to a Greek mythical chimera that had a lion’s head, a goat’s body and a snake’s tail. Similarly, the bizarre crab had a mouth of a shrimp, claws of a modern frog crab, shell of a lobster, paddle-like appendages of a sea scorpion, and giant human soccer ball-sized eyes.

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“[It had] huge, enormous eyes,” study lead researcher Javier Luque told Live Science. “They’re like Little Red Riding Hood [when she asks the wolf], ‘What big eyes you have. What do you use them for?’”

In this case, the ancient crab used its huge eyes and powerful claws to hunt crustaceans like comma shrimp. “We don’t think they were filter feeders. We think they were actually active predators,” said Luque.

Apart from being a mix of various animals, the crab also looked like a combination of baby and adult parts. For example, the crab larvae had large, socketless compound eyes, bent claws, leg-like mouth parts, exposed tails, and a long body – all of which are seen in grown ones.

The scientists discovered that the strange-looking crab fossil lived about 95 million to 90 million years ago. These crab fossils were found in various places, which meant that they were likely to be highly adaptable.

“I call it my beautiful nightmare because it was so beautiful and frustrating to figure out”, Luque expressed. “This discovery, from the mid-Cretaceous, illustrates that there are still surprising discoveries of more recent, weird organisms waiting to be found, especially in the tropics.”