(May 10, 2015 at 9:56 am)Chuck Wrote: But recent discoveries indicates it was an arthropod, and probably more closely related to crabs and lobsters than other Arthropods...at most it can only take golf ball sized plugs of flesh from you when it catches you.
I'm glad it'll be only a big chunk instead of my whole leg; nonetheless I'll be very careful before stepping into the surf at Key Largo. I thought this was the bits & pieces of carbonized critter in the Burgess Shale at Charles Walcott's quarry up in Banff Nat'l Park, but my, those eye stalks! Do they wiggle about to look in different directions? I'm also curious why the mouthparts have those little feathery brushes on them. To me that looks like some kind of filter-feeding or combing through debris, but from what you said they must be spines with that "one-way" feature that keeps prey from getting away from its grasp.
If I remember it also had a round, radicle-like mouth opening, and Stephen Jay Gould in Wonderful Life had said all these bits, found separately, were initially thought to be several different critters. After Ken Ham updates his museum in Kentucky, Adam and Eve will cruise down the River Pishon on its back, on their way out of the Garden of Eden.
