Horse crabs have been passing through the waters of the Earth’s shallow oceans for hundreds of millions of years, but fossil scientists have recently discovered one that appears to be from a distant, distant galaxy. Mar Press release reports, the shell of the 245-million-year-old creature is shaped like Darth Vader’s helmet, which prompted researchers to name the prehistoric rapist Vaderlimulus tricki. (Tricki pays homage to Trick Runions, the discoverer of the fossil.)
Paleontologists from the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science and the University of Colorado described the Vader horse crab in a new report published in the German journal Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie. Found in Idaho, Vaderlimulus tricki they lived in the late Triassic and belonged to a now extinct family Austrolimulidae. All his life, he lived on the west coast of the supernatural Pangea.
Vaderlimulus trickiThe special shell can be captured in an evolutionary state, scientists explain in a press release, as the creatures “extended their ecological range from sea to freshwater conditions during the Triassic and often exhibits body changes that give them a strange look according to today’s standards. . “
Horse crabs have survived at least 470 million years on Earth, and are often called “living fossils”. But individual species have died out over thousands of years (only four of them survive today), and there are few fossils of horses’ crabs. When new ones are found, they often belong to a species that was not previously known to science. Vaderlimulus tricki, in particular, the first Triassic horse-crab crab found in North America.
[h/t Newsweek]