Some ancient marine animals filtered the food they took directly from the ocean, more or less as certain cetaceans do today. That's at least what fossils found in northern Greenladia suggest. A study promoted by researchers at the University of Bristol, in the United Kingdom, and published in Nature establishes that archaic arthropods of the species Tamisiocaris, which lived about 520 million years ago, were nourished thanks to a mechanism similar to that which still exists today. Baleen whales use.
According to the scientists, these animals, which were around 70 centimeters long (when they emerged, during the so-called Cambrian explosion, they were among the largest) and were equipped with two compound eyes, they used facial appendages to capture large prey, like trilobites. However, the recently analyzed remains suggest that they evolved in a kind of sieve that they used to trap small crustaceans and other organisms up to half a millimeter in size.
To visualize the movements that these biostructures could make, the experts built a digital three-dimensional recreation of them. In his opinion, their way of feeding not only proves that the oceans of that time were saturated with life, especially plankton, but that some superpredators , such as Tamisiocaris , abandoned an active hunting system and adopted a more passive one, in which they limited themselves to float and propelled themselves waving some lateral fins.
