A Football-Shaped Animal Species Is Discovered In A 500-Million-Year-Old Shale

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A reconstruction of the Titanokorys gainesi, a new species of extinct sea animal discovered in Canada.

Lars Fields/Royal Ontario Museum

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Lars Fields/Royal Ontario Museum

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High up in the mountains of Kootenay National Park, the Royal Ontario Museum fieldwork crew extracts a shale slab containing a fossil of Titanokorys gainesi.

Jean-Bernard Caron/Royal Ontario Museum

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Jean-Bernard Caron/Royal Ontario Museum

Science
Scientists Discover Not 1, But 2 New Dinosaur Species In China

«The sheer size of this animal is absolutely mind-boggling, this is one of the biggest animals from the Cambrian period ever found,» said Jean-Bernard Caron, the museum’s Richard M. Ivey Curator of Invertebrate Palaeontology, in a statement.

The Titanokorys belongs to a subgroup of primitive arthropods called hurdiids, which have long heads and a three-part carapace, a kind of hard outer shell.

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A reconstruction of the Titanokorys gainesi, viewed from the front.

Lars Fields/Royal Ontario Museum

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Lars Fields/Royal Ontario Museum

The Two-Way
Scientists Discover ‘Remarkable Little Octopod,’ Possibly New Species

The scientists said the broad, flat head of the Titanokorys suggests it swam near the seafloor, using its front limbs to scoop prey toward its mouth.

A similar species, discovered in the same area in 2018, is named the Cambroraster falcatus, because scientists thought its head carapace resembled the Millennium Falcon, a ship from the movie Star Wars.