Scientists have discovered the ancestors of scorpions, spiders and other mutilated animals 500 million years ago

, Sept. 12 (Xinhua Wang Wei) Reporters from the
Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology learned that the institute researchers in cooperation with the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada, the discovery of a new life of 500 million years ago paleontology. The new species, called the Fat Female Hunter Morrison, is the oldest known arthropod. The study pushed back the origin of the pods by about 30 million years.
were published in nature, the world's top scientific journal, on December 12, Beijing time.
is a large arthropod group that includes more than 115,000 species such as scorpions, spiders, ticks and dragonflies. In front of their mouths are a pair of small, edible pliers-like appendicates, called "limbs". The biology community has named these arthropods as erthropods.
, the fat female hunter Morrison, was found to be about 2.5cm long. Despite being only thumb-sized, the researchers believe it could be a "ferocious" predator. It has a pair of spheroidal eyes on its head and a pair of typical limbs and multiple pairs of appendicides in front of its mouth, which allows the fat female hunter Morrison worm to kill, clamp and shred her prey. It also has three pairs of walking feet on its head and three gills-like structures on the limbs at the back of its body, according to which researchers have determined that the fat female hunter Morrison worm probably lived on the sea floor 500 million years ago.

Cedric Aria, a French postdoctoral student at Nangu Institute who was involved in the study, said the fat female hunter Morrison worm was physically close to modern muscillators. As a result, the true origin of the mutilated animals is likely to have been earlier, even in the early days of the famous Camburo outbreak. There is growing fossil evidence that the origin and explosive development of animals may have been more rapid and intense in the early stages of life evolution than previously thought.