Anomalocaris Arthropod Soft Stuffed Plush Toy

❃ Half a billion years ago, when most of life on Earth was still small, soft, and tentative, Anomalocaris was the apex predator of the world's seas. Reaching up to a metre in length at a time when most animals measured in millimetres, it cruised the shallow Cambrian oceans on a fringe of rippling side flaps, hunting trilobites and other early arthropods with a pair of grasping appendages and a strange circular mouth lined with serrated plates.

❃  Its name — Latin for "abnormal shrimp" — comes from one of the great misidentifications in palaeontology. When the first fossils were discovered in the Burgess Shale of British Columbia in the late 1800s, the creature was so unlike anything alive that its scattered parts were described as three separate animals: a shrimp, a jellyfish, and a sea cucumber. It took nearly a century before researchers finally pieced the fragments together and realised they were looking at a single, far stranger predator.

❃ The eyes of Anomalocaris alone are remarkable — compound structures with as many as sixteen thousand individual lenses, giving it some of the sharpest vision of any animal of its era. As a top predator at the dawn of complex life, it helped drive the evolutionary arms race we now call the Cambrian Explosion, accelerating the emergence of armour, speed, and defensive behaviours across the early animal kingdom. The first great hunter, and one of the strangest the planet has ever produced. 

Toy Specifications:

Package includes: 1 x Anomalocaris Arthropod Soft Stuffed Plush Toy

Shipping time: Due to high demand please allow 2-3 weeks for delivery.

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