During the Cambrian explosion 500 million years ago, strange creatures in the ocean were busy reshaping life on land. One of these creatures has recently been discovered in the Rocky Mountains of Canada and identified as one of the largest animals of this period.
Artist’s rendering of the front of T. gainesi. (Photo: Lars Fields, Royal Ontario Museum).
This animal is named Titanokorys gainesi and resembles a tank. T. gainesi has compound eyes, a round mouth that looks like a slice of pineapple, claws for capturing prey, fins for swimming, and a head protected by a large carapace. This creature belongs to a group of primitive arthropods known as radiodonts. The morphology of the fossil and the circumstances of its discovery were published by scientists in the Open Science Journal of the Royal Society on September 7.
“The first specimens were found in 2014, but it wasn’t until 2018 that we discovered an extremely pristine species [and] realized the significance of this finding,” Joe Moysiuk said in an email response to Gizmodo. He is a paleontologist at the Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto) and a co-author of the research on this fossil. “My co-author, Jean-Bernard, had extracted a particularly large slab of rock, and I heard a loud gasp, followed by a lot of cheering as people gathered around. We found many wonderful things, but this one was truly impressive!”
The holotype of T. gainesi with the carapace below and two ridged plates above. (Photo: Jean-Bernard Caron, Royal Ontario Museum).
The research team found the fossil in the Burgess Shale formation in Canada, which is located in western North America and contains numerous well-preserved fossils of Cambrian animals (approximately 541 – 485 million years ago, when this area was still underwater). T. gainesi and similar predatory animals seem to have been filter feeders, sifting through mud and consuming any remaining debris.
Some organisms from the ocean floor became fossilized and were later uplifted due to tectonic shifts; they now lie in the high mountains of Yoho National Park (Canada). To transport the fossil down the mountain, Moysiuk stated that the team wrapped it in foam, tape, and small cushions before airlifting it.
Two years ago, this same research team discovered an animal resembling T. gainesi, naming it Cambroraster falcatus because it resembles Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon spaceship from Star Wars. The slab can preserve even the soft tissues of Cambrian creatures. This allows paleontologists to study these minute evolutionary remnants in greater detail than some dinosaur species that appeared about 300 million years later. (Indeed, the first dinosaurs appeared closer to us than to the Cambrian period!).
Perhaps the most impressive aspect of T. gainesi is its size. Most marine organisms during the Cambrian period were smaller than our pinky fingers; in contrast, this species measures about 45 cm in length. If typical Cambrian creatures were the height of an average human, a T. gainesi would proportionally stand about 12.2 meters tall.
“The absolute size of this creature is truly astonishing; it is one of the largest animals from the Cambrian ever discovered,” Jean-Bernard Caron stated in a museum press release. He is a paleontologist at the Royal Ontario Museum and the lead author of the study.
“These mysterious animals surely had a significant impact on the Cambrian benthic ecosystem. Its front limbs resemble rakes stacked on top of each other, and they were very effective at bringing anything caught in their small spines to its mouth. The large dorsal carapace could function like a plow,” Caron noted.
You can imagine this creature as a balloon-like predator, floating just above the ocean floor to scavenge and search for food. This discovery has helped expand human knowledge of armored predatory animals from the Cambrian. For those who are intrigued by even more terrifying creatures, let’s hope scientists uncover them soon.
