Henry Gee

That's a big mama.

Yeah, that was the big predator of the time.

Anomalocaris means kind of weird shrimp, clearly.

And the anomalocaris in the Cambrian were very successful.

In fact, they survived the Cambrian because there has been

wonderful fossils coming out of Morocco, more recently the Fezouata formation in Morocco, which is not Cambrian, it's Ordovician, it's the succeeding period, and that includes the latest known anomalous carids.

They were also anomalous carids that were filter feeders, a bit like the versions of basking sharks.

So they were big, but were filter feeders.

And so they specialised in various ways, these anomalous carids.

Yeah.

Oh, possibly, possibly.

But there were lots of other things there at the time.

I mean, there were all sorts of arthropods, which are known as great appendage arthropods.

These were more like, if you can imagine, lobsters, but with immense, much more immense claws sticking right out from the front end of the animal.

These have been found.

These are a very kind of Cambrian arthropods.

So there are loads and loads and loads of arthropods from the Cambrian world.

from which evolved, from a small selection, the arthropods we get today, such as chelicerates, which is scorpions and spiders, and crustaceans, from which the insects are actually an offshoot of crustaceans.

They're the kind of land-living crustaceans in the same way that tetrapods are land-living fish.

And things like horseshoe crabs that look kind of prehistoric.