Yawunik (Photo : Reuters)
A four-eyed faced Cambrian predator with a wicked set of arms was recovered by a team of researchers in British Columbia which led them to their discovery of the fossil.
Yawunik kootenayi is the marine creature that lived 508 million years ago during the Cambrian Period. It is the period when majority of the complex ecosystem and animal groups first appeared in the fossil records. The size of this fossil is as big as an "empanada" or approximately 6 inches long, according to Live Science.
The mentioned creature is the first in its new species that was reportedly recovered from a fossil discovery in Marble Canyon in British Columbia's Kootenay National Park.
The physical attributes of the marine creature are composed of two sets of eyes, external skeleton, segmented body, and an antennae looking appendage which helped arthropods to live around 250 million years ago even before the first dinosaurs roamed the earth.
The first time this creature was discovered go way back when an international team of palaeontologists from the University of Toronto and Pomona College did a research at the Canadian Burgess Shale fossil deposit, according to Science Times.
"This creature is expanding our perspective on the anatomy and predatory habits of the first arthropods, the group to which spiders and lobsters belong," Cédric Aria explained, lead author of the study of the University of Toronto.
Yawunik has the anatomy and predatory traits of the early arthropods like lobsters and spiders. However, it did not possess extra appendages in the head that were particularly modified to process its food.
