This Ancient Crab Had Unusually Huge Eyes
The New York Times
A study of fossils from Colombia suggests that a prehistoric shellfish hunted prey with remarkably sharp vision.
Modern, adult crabs are not renowned for their swimming ability or their vision. They scuttle across the floors of silent seas, hardly reliant on small eyes as they scavenge or graze.
But 95 million years ago, an unusual crab flitted with unusual grace around the tropical waters of what is now Colombia. The quarter-size species, Callichimaera perplexa, looked a bit like a spider, with flat, oarlike legs and a keeled body. And it had a large set of eyes, too.
In a study published last month in the journal iScience, a group of paleontologists have shown that those eyes gave Callichimaera remarkably sharp vision and a likely lifestyle as a free-swimming predator.
