Geoscientist 22.05 June 2012
'Palaeontology is full of surprises' - How true is Richard Fortey’s remark! Anomalocaris, the Cambrian’s fiercest predator and grandest of Walcott’s Burgess Shale fossil finds in British Columbia, has now appeared in the Ordovician of Morocco, ‘king-sized’ and a metre long1,2.
The discovery was made in the Fezouata rock formation, 488-472 million years old, in southeastern Morocco. Another article by Thomas3 reports that a lone fossil found in the Devonian of Germany4 was obviously an Anomalocaridid, though not identified as such. This article has a creationist flavour, but the probable lesson to be learnt from these discoveries is that the fossil record is extremely incomplete, not that it is wrong (harking back to diluvian thinking). I would not be surprised if an Anomalocaridid is found like the Coelacanth, swimming off the remote Comoro Islands, which I visited on the flying boat ‘Canopus’ in 1942.