Discovered less than a decade ago, this area has yielded a great variety of Burgess Shale animals dating back to the Cambrian period, including a smaller, more abundant relative of Titanokorys named Cambroraster falcatus in reference to its Millennium Falcon-shaped head carapace.
The huge dorsal carapace might have functioned like a plough,” added Caron, who is Moysiuk’s PhD adviser.Īll fossils in the study were collected around Marble Canyon in northern Kootenay National Park by successive ROM expeditions. Their limbs at the front looked like multiple stacked rakes and would have been very efficient at bringing anything they captured in their tiny spines towards the mouth. “These enigmatic animals certainly had a big impact on Cambrian seafloor ecosystems. Why some radiodonts evolved such a bewildering array of head carapace shapes and sizes is still poorly understood and was likely driven by a variety of factors, but the broad flattened carapace form in Titanokorys suggests this species was adapted to life near the seafloor. Jean-Bernard Caron and Joe Moysiuk in the ROM palaeontogy lab room examining Titanokorys gainesi and Cambroraster falcatus (photo by Andrew Gregg/© Red Trillium) The head is so long relative to the body that these animals are really little more than swimming heads,” added Joe Moysiuk, co-author of the study, and a PhD student in EEB based at the ROM. “Titanokorys is part of a subgroup of radiodonts, called hurdiids, characterized by an incredibly long head covered by a three-part carapace that took on myriad shapes. Within this group, some species also possessed large, conspicuous head carapaces, with Titanokorys being one of the largest ever known.
MOST RECENT ANIMAL DISCOVERED SERIES
Like all radiodonts, Titanokorys had multifaceted eyes, a pineapple slice-shaped, tooth-lined mouth, a pair of spiny claws below its head to capture prey and a body with a series of flaps for swimming. The most iconic representative of this group is the streamlined predator Anomalocaris, which may itself have approached a metre in length.
Ivey Curator of Invertebrate Palaeontology at the ROM.Įvolutionarily speaking, Titanokorys belongs to a group of primitive arthropods called radiodonts. “The sheer size of this animal is absolutely mind-boggling – this is one of the biggest animals from the Cambrian period ever found,” says Jean-Bernard Caron, an associate professor in the departments of Earth sciences and ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB) in the Faculty of Arts & Science at U of T and the Richard M. Jean-Bernard Caron sits above a fossil of Titanokorys gainesi at the quarry site located in Kootenay National Park (ohoto by Joe Moysiuk)
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