An Ancient Aquatic Raptor

"This new species would have been an efficient predator and a terrifying sight to many of the smallest marine creatures that lived during that time."
"This new species was well adapted to capturing prey with the numerous, claw-like spines surrounding its mouth. Darting from the water depths, the spines would have been a terrifying sight to many of the smallest marine creatures that lived during that time.”
Jean-Bernard Caron, senior curator, invertebrate paleontology, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto

"If you imagine putting your two hands together at the wrist and opening your fingers in a sort of curved manner and bringing them together, you get the idea of what these grasping spines might look like."
"This is quite a good apparatus for grasping prey and bringing it towards the mouth."
"Predators tend to be key to developing the structure of marine communities, in that the predators evolved to capture prey and the prey in turn evolves to avoid being predated on."
"So in that sense they indicate that those kinds of predator-prey interactions were important right back in the Cambrian (Period)."
"The specimens preserve evidence of features such as the gut and muscles, which normally decay away, as well as the more decay-resistant grasping spines. They show that chaetognath predators evolved during the explosion of marine diversity during the Cambrian Period, and were an important component of some of the earliest marine ecosystems."
Derek Briggs, Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, Connecticut

Illustration of Capinatator praetermissus. (Drawing by Marianne Collins. Copyright Royal Ontario Museum.)

In British Columbia's Yoho and Kootenay national parks, registered as UNESCO World Heritage sites, new well-preserved specimens of ancient aquatic worms have been found, leading paleontologists to celebrate the discovery of 50 specimens of a newly-identified marine creature so different from what exists today that it presents as an entirely new genus of creatures. They were discovered in the Burgess Shale fossil beds, a repository rich in fossils representing some of Earth's oldest creatures dating back 500-million years in prehistory.

The newly discovered found fossils of a spiky-headed worm ten centimetres long, equipped with 25 spines on either side of its head, has been named Capinatator praetermissus, from the Latin words for 'to grasp', 'swimmer', and 'overlooked'. Researchers at the Royal Ontario Museum and Yale University co- authored a study published in the journal Current Biology, describing these creatures encased in sediment, preserved in admirable detail.

Of the specimens studied, many preserve the feeding apparatus attached to the head, with some showing evidence of the rest of the body. Forty-eight specimens are held by the Royal Ontario Museum and one, with an isolated set of grasping appendages, is from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Specimen from the Collins Quarry, Mount Stephen (Yoho National Park, BC). (Photo by J.B. Caron/Royal Ontario Museum)

Capinatator is believed by these scientists to represent an ancestor of worms abundant as aquatic creatures to the present day within plankton, populating the oceans of the world. Those living at the present time are smaller worms, equipped with fewer head spines than the specimens discovered in fossil form, giving paleontologists a bird's-eye view of how life on Earth exploded  roughly 541 million years ago, during the Cambrian Period.