LUSAKA: A group of researchers from Yale University and Oxford in the UK have found a crustacean-like sea monster, two meters long, which haunted the earth’s ocean 480 million years ago and ate as do whales today, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. This creature “was one of the greatest animals that lived at that time,” said zoologist Allison Daley, one of the authors of the study, from the University of Oxford.
The sea monster had on its head a network of thorns that filtered food and is the oldest known aquatic giants that fed itself by filtering seawater.
This new species was named Aegirocassis benmoulae after the name of the Moroccan fossil hunter Mohamed Ben Moula, who conducted excavations in Morocco.
Aegirocassis benmoulae is part of the extinct family known as anomalocaridides, marine animals which appeared 520 million years ago. However, so far most of the discovered anomalocaridides were predators who were at the top of the food chain, closer to current sharks. This new species of anomalocaridide is more like whales, which also filter seawater through their baleen to collect plankton, but they are in the family of mammals.
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