Description

Anomalocaridid
Early Ordovician (Arenigian)
Upper Fezouata Formation
Zagora, Morocco

Big 88mm appendage on large 200mm slab. Largest and most displayable appendage of this new Ordovician anomalocarid we have ever had. The full animal must have been close to 1 meter long.

Soft-bodied.  Arthropod. Lagerstatten.

Anomalocaridids were a group of actively-swimming arthropods (Suborder Anomalocaridida) best known from the Cambrian but surviving into the Devonian.  In the Cambrian they were the largest predators on earth perhaps 2 feet in length.  In the Ordovician, one form was over twice the size but had evolved into a filter-feeder.

Once thought to have died out by the end of the Cambrian, an anomalocaridid was described from the Early Devonian of Germany (Hunsruck Shale) in 2009.