The ancient (and now extinct) frog known as the Beelzebufo had powerful jaws, ones far more powerful than ordinary frogs that exist today, and it feasted on creatures that included small dinosaurs and crocodiles. Such information comes from a new study analyzing the jaw strength of this extinct frog, which lived about 68 million years ago.
Unfortunately (or perhaps very fortunately), these giant frogs no longer exist, and so researchers had to figure out their approximate bite force by looking at present-days frogs; specifically, the Pacman frog from the Ceratophrys genus. This frog is small but has a powerful jaw capable of bites with about 6.6lbs of force.
Knowing that, the researchers estimated that larger horned frogs found in South America — ones with a head size closer to 10 cm — can bite with a force of about 500 newtons. One research explained that as feeling like having 13 gallons of water placed on the tip of your finger. Still, that pales in comparison to the estimated bite force of the extinct giant frogs.
Using that scaled estimation and what is known about the size of the ancient frogs, researchers estimated that the Beelzebufo may have had a bite force at a much higher 2200 newtons of force, or about 73 times that of the simple Pacman frog. This puts the giant frog in the same category as major predators including wolves.
This means — assuming the estimation is correct — that the giant frog would have feasted on things far larger than small reptiles and insects, likely including young and small dinosaurs as well as crocodiles.

In 1984, Sankar Chatterjee – curator of paleontology for the Museum of Texas Tech University – and his student, Bryan Small, made an astounding discovery.
Working on Seymour Island in Antarctica, they uncovered the fossilized skull of an animal they'd never seen before. While it was obviously a plesiosaur – a Cretaceous-period marine reptile scientists first discovered in the early 1600s – this plesiosaur was unlike any previously found. They named the new species Morturneria and brought its skeleton back to the Museum of Texas Tech.
Now, 33 years later, Chatterjee and his team have made a new discovery about Morturneria, one that adds a whole new dimension to science's understanding of plesiosaurs – and larger than that, to the understanding of evolution itself.
More than 65 million years ago, the Earth's oceans were populated with many animals still found there today, like fish, krill and sharks. But one of the oceans' biggest predators, the plesiosaurs, went extinct at the same time as the dinosaurs on land.
"Often, plesiosaurs are called sea monsters," said Chatterjee, a Horn Professor in the Department of Geosciences. "They were large – 50 feet long, superb swimmers and occupied the top of the marine food chain. Although dinosaurs are very familiar to everyone, during their days, the sea was ruled by these monster-like plesiosaurs. Like dinosaurs on land, they dominated the sea from Arctic to Antarctic waters. "
Plesiosaurs had a broad, flat body and short tail, four long flippers they used to "fly" through the water, long necks and very sharp teeth.
"The teeth of most plesiosaurs are conical, stout, sharp, robust and ideal for stabbing and killing large animals," Chatterjee said.
But as he wrote in his 1984 paper announcing Morturneria's discovery, "the long, slender and delicate teeth may have formed a 'trapping' device that enabled (the animals) to feed on small fish and crustaceans that abound in the same deposits."

Whales, that are today known as 'gentle giants', were actually predators with extremely sharp teeth, Australian scientists have revealed.
Ancient whales were nothing like the present-day gentle giants, say scientists, debunking theories that the mammals used their teeth to filter feed.
There are two major groups of whales, toothed creatures such as killer whales, and baleen, which filter plankton and small fish from the ocean for food with special bristle-like structures in their mouths.
Using 3D scanners, Museums Victoria and Monash University palaeontologists made digital teeth models of fossil baleen whales and today's mammals from specimen collections around the world.
They found that teeth in ancient baleen whales, the ancestors of the Southern Right and Blue whale, were different to the present-day and were instead much sharper.
"These results are the first to show that ancient baleen whales had extremely sharp teeth with one function – cutting the flesh of their prey," Museums Victoria's senior curator of vertebrate palaeontology Erich Fitzgerald said.
"Contrary to what many people thought, whales never used their teeth as a sieve, and instead evolved their signature filter feeding technique later – maybe after their teeth had already been lost."
A previous theory about ancient whales suggested they filtered feed using teeth that when closed formed a zigzag-like sieve, in a similar manner to some living Antarctica seals.
The sieve trapped food in the mouth and also allowed water to flow between the teeth. They were eventually replaced by baleen, the theory added.
The discovery, published Wednesday in the journal Biology Letters, meant "whales completely turned their feeding biology upside down" when they evolved to filter feed, Museums Victoria and Monash University research fellow David Hocking said.
The researchers said there was more work to do to understand the origins of baleen whales, which are Earth's largest animals, but feed on some of the smallest ocean creatures.

New York: Scientists have discovered a new species of long-necked titanosaurian dinosaur in Tanzania that lived about 70 to 100 million years ago.
The new species named Shingopana songwensis is a member of the gigantic, long-necked sauropods. Its fossil was discovered in the Songwe region of the Great Rift Valley in southwestern Tanzania.
"There are anatomical features present only in Shingopana and in several South American titanosaurs, but not in other African titanosaurs," said Eric Gorscak, a paleontologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, US.
"Shingopana had siblings in South America, whereas other African titanosaurs were only distant cousins," Gorscak added.
The team conducted phylogenetic analyses to understand the evolutionary relationships of these and other titanosaurs.
They found that Shingopana was more closely related to titanosaurs of South America than to any of the other species currently known from Africa or elsewhere.
"This discovery suggests that the fauna of northern and southern Africa were very different in the Cretaceous Period," said Judy Skog, a programme director in National Science Fuundation in the US.
"At that time, southern Africa dinosaurs were more closely related to those in South America, and were more widespread than we knew," Skog added.
Shingopana roamed the Cretaceous landscape alongside Rukwatitan bisepultus, another titanosaur identified in 2014, researchers said.
Part of the Shingopana skeleton was excavated in 2002 by scientists affiliated with the Rukwa Rift Basin Project, an international effort led by Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine researchers Patrick O'Connor and Nancy Stevens.
The findings were published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

A white moose in Sweden has gone viral thanks to video footage of the rare animal taking a dip.
P4 Varmland Sveriges Radio reports that Hans Nilsson shot the video Aug. 11 in the Swedish province of Varmland. “The white bull moose came swimming straight towards his camera,” it reported, in a Facebook post. Nilsson had been searching for the rare animal for three years, according to P4 Varmland Sveriges Radio.
The video of the moose entering and emerging from a stream has been viewed more than 1 million times on Facebook. It has also racked up more than 3,000 comments and almost 19,000 shares.

The Associated Press reports that there are only around 100 white moose in Sweden. The animals are not albino, but grow white fur due to a generic mutation.
There are more than 400,000 of the more common breed of moose in Sweden, according to The Independent.
Last month, an extremely rare pale tiger in Southern India also went viral after it was photographed for the first time.
In June, a rare albino dolphin was spotted off the coast of California.

Washington: The massive asteroid strike that wiped out dinosaurs some 66 million years ago would have plunged the Earth into darkness for nearly two years, a study has found.
The asteroid triggered global wildfires that lofted into the air tremendous amounts of soot.
This would have shut down photosynthesis, drastically cooled the planet, and contributed to the mass extinction that marked the end of the age of dinosaurs.
The study, led by researchers at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), used a computer model to paint a rich picture of how Earth's conditions might have looked at the end of the Cretaceous Period.NCAR), used a computer model to paint a rich picture of how Earth's conditions might have looked at the end of the Cretaceous Period.
The findings, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may help better understand why some species died, especially in the oceans, while others survived.
Scientists estimate that more than three-quarters of all species on Earth, including all non-avian dinosaurs, disappeared at the boundary of the Cretaceous-Paleogene periods, an event known as the K-Pg extinction.
Evidence shows that the extinction occurred at the same time that a large asteroid hit Earth in what is now the Yucatan Peninsula. The collision would have triggered earthquakes, tsunamis, and even volcanic eruptions.
Scientists also calculate that the force of the impact would have launched vaporized rock high above Earth's surface, where it would have condensed into small particles known as spherules.
As the spherules fell back to Earth, they would have been heated by friction to temperatures high enough to spark global fires and broil Earth's surface.
A thin layer of spherules can be found worldwide in the geologic record.
"The extinction of many of the large animals on land could have been caused by the immediate aftermath of the impact, but animals that lived in the oceans or those that could burrow underground or slip underwater temporarily could have survived," said NCAR scientist Charles Bardeen, who led the study.NCAR scientist Charles Bardeen, who led the study.
"Our study picks up the story after the initial effects - after the earthquakes and the tsunamis and the broiling. We wanted to look at the long-term consequences of the amount of soot we think was created and what those consequences might have meant for the animals that were left," said Bardeen.
Researchers used the NCAR-based Community Earth System Model (CESM) to simulate the effect of the soot on global climate going forward.NCAR-based Community Earth System Model (CESM) to simulate the effect of the soot on global climate going forward.
In the simulations, soot heated by the Sun was lofted higher and higher into the atmosphere, eventually forming a global barrier that blocked the vast majority of sunlight from reaching Earth's surface.
While the skies would have gradually brightened, photosynthesis would have been impossible for more than a year and a half, according to the simulations.
Since many of the plants on land would have already been incinerated in the fires, the darkness would likely have had its greatest impact on phytoplankton, which underpin the ocean food chain.
The loss of these tiny organisms would have had a ripple effect through the ocean, eventually devastating many species of marine life

New Delhi: In 1956, a team undertook an expedition to the Brazil rainforests to seek out a rare, mysterious species of monkeys – the Vanzolini saki. Unfortunately, however, they only encountered dead monkeys.
80 years later, during a recent trek this month, Laura Marsh, director of the Global Conservation Institute and a renowned saki expert, took it upon herself to go in search of a saki after identifying five new species of the monkeys in 2014.
To her excitement, the elusive primate that was first documented in the year 1936, showed itself to her. The saki expert told National Geographic: "I was trembling and so excited I could barely take a picture."
According to the Independent UK, Dr Marsh organised her "Houseboat Amazon" team to document the biodiversity in the region near Brazil's border with Peru – but with a special focus on finding the Vanzolini saki.
The Vanzolini bald-faced saki has shaggy black hair and distinctive golden legs. It was spotted running among the trees on all fours.
Lacking the prehensile tail of other monkeys, it moves more like a cat, Dr Marsh told National Geographic.

The 3.5 metre (11ft) pregnant ichthyosaur lived at the time of the earliest dinosaurs during the early Jurassic period.
Scientists said the incomplete embryo was less than seven centimetres long and consisted of preserved vertebrae, a forefin, ribs and a few other bones.
There was evidence the foetus was still developing in the womb when it died.
The find adds to evidence that ichthyosaurs, some of which grew to more than 20 metres, gave birth to live young unlike egg-laying dinosaurs.
Dean Lomax, from the University of Manchester, who co-led the UK-German team, said: "This specimen provides new insights into the size range of the species, but also records only the third example of an ichthyosaurus known with an embryo. That's special."
The creature, named ichthyosaurus somersetensis, was discovered on the Somerset coast during the 1990s but ended up in the collections of the Lower Saxony State Museum in Hanover, Germany.

Melbourne: Modern humans may have exited Africa and arrived in Southeast Asia over 70,000 years ago, much earlier than previously thought, scientists said today.
The study led by researchers at Macquarie University in Australia also suggests that humans could have potentially made the crossing to Australia even earlier than the accepted 60,000 to 65,000 years ago.
The dating of a cave site in West Sumatra in Indonesia, called Lida Ajer, provided researchers the first evidence for rainforest use of modern humans.
"Rainforests are not the easiest place to make a living, especially for a savannah-adapted primate, so it suggests that these people were ahead of the curve in terms of intelligence, planning and technological adaptation," said Gilbert Price from University of Queensland in Australia.
As a result of thorough documentation of the cave, reanalysis of the specimens, and a new dating programme, it was confirmed that the teeth found there were of modern humans, Homo sapiens, and dated back 73,000 years.
A barrage of dating techniques were applied to the sediment around the fossils, to overlying and underlying rock deposits in the cave and to associated mammal teeth, indicating that the deposit and fossils were laid down between 63,000 to 73,000 years ago, researchers said.
The study was published in the journal Nature.

The team conducted phylogenetic analyses to understand the evolutionary relationships of these and other titanosaurs.

Scientists have discovered a new species of long-necked titanosaurian dinosaur in Tanzania that lived about 70 to 100 million years ago. The new species named Shingopana songwensis is a member of the gigantic, long-necked sauropods. Its fossil was discovered in the Songwe region of the Great Rift Valley in southwestern Tanzania.
"There are anatomical features present only in Shingopana and in several South American titanosaurs, but not in other African titanosaurs," said Eric Gorscak, a paleontologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, US.
"Shingopana had siblings in South America, whereas other African titanosaurs were only distant cousins," Gorscak added.
The team conducted phylogenetic analyses to understand the evolutionary relationships of these and other titanosaurs.
They found that Shingopana was more closely related to titanosaurs of South America than to any of the other species currently known from Africa or elsewhere.
"This discovery suggests that the fauna of northern and southern Africa were very different in the Cretaceous Period," said Judy Skog, a programme director in National Science Fuundation in the US.
"At that time, southern Africa dinosaurs were more closely related to those in South America, and were more widespread than we knew," Skog added.
Shingopana roamed the Cretaceous landscape alongside Rukwatitan bisepultus, another titanosaur identified in 2014, researchers said.
Part of the Shingopana skeleton was excavated in 2002 by scientists affiliated with the Rukwa Rift Basin Project, an international effort led by Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine researchers Patrick O'Connor and Nancy Stevens.

A 13-million-year-old infant’s skull, discovered in Africa in 2014, comes from a new species of ape that may not be far removed from the common ancestor of living apes and humans.

The tiny find, about the size of a lemon, is one of the most complete skulls known of any extinct ape that inhabited Africa, Asia or Europe between 25 million and 5 million years ago, researchers report in the Aug. 10 Nature. The fossil provides the most detailed look to date at a member of a line of African primates that are now candidates for central players in the evolution of present-day apes and humans.

Most fossils from more than 40 known extinct ape species amount to no more than jaw fragments or a few isolated teeth. A local fossil hunter spotted the nearly complete skull in rock layers located near Kenya’s Lake Turkana. Members of a team led by paleoanthropologist Isaiah Nengo estimated the fossil’s age by assessing radioactive forms of the element argon in surrounding rock, which decay at a known rate.

Comparisons with other African ape fossils indicate that the infant’s skull belongs to a new species that the researchers named Nyanzapithecus alesi. Other species in this genus, previously known from jaws and teeth, date to as early as around 25 million years ago.

“This skull comes from an ancient group of apes that existed in Africa for over 10 million years and was close to the evolutionary origin of living apes and humans,” says Nengo, of Stony Brook University in New York and De Anza College in Cupertino, Calif.

He and colleagues looked inside the skull using a powerful type of 3-D X-ray imaging. This technique revealed microscopic enamel layers that had formed daily from birth in developing adult teeth that yet to erupt. A count of those layers indicates that the ape was 16 months old when it died.

Based on a presumably rapid growth rate, the scientists calculated that the ancient ape would have weighed about 11.3 kilograms as an adult. Its adult brain volume would have been almost three times larger than that of known African monkeys from the same time, the researchers estimate.

N. alesi’s tiny mouth and nose, along with several other facial characteristics, make it look much like small-bodied apes called gibbons. Faces resembling gibbons evolved independently in several extinct monkeys, apes and their relatives, the researchers say. The same probably held for N. alesi, making it an unlikely direct ancestor of living gibbons, they conclude.

No lower-body bones turned up with the new find. Even so, it’s possible to tell that N. alesi did not behave as present-day gibbons do. In gibbons, a part of the inner ear called the semicircular canals, which coordinates balance, is large relative to body size. That allows the apes to swing acrobatically from one tree branch to another. N. alesi’s small semicircular canals indicate that it moved cautiously in trees, Nengo says.

Several of the infant skull’s features, including those downsized semicircular canals, connect it to a poorly understood, 7-million- to 8-million-year-old ape called Oreopithecus. Fossils of that primate, discovered in Italy, suggest it walked upright with a slow, shuffling gait. If an evolutionary relationship existed with the older N. alesi, the first members of the Oreopithecus genus probably originated in Africa, Nengo proposes.

Without any lower-body bones for N. alesi, it’s too early to rule out the possibility that Nyanzapithecus gave rise to modern gibbons and perhaps Oreopithecus as well, says paleontologist David Alba of the Catalan Institute of Paleontology Miquel Crusafont in Barcelona. Gibbon ancestors are thought to have diverged from precursors of living great apes and humans between 20 million and 15 million years ago, Alba says.

Despite the age and unprecedented completeness of the new ape skull, no reported tooth or skull features clearly place N. alesi close to the origins of living apes and humans, says paleoanthropologist David Begun of the University of Toronto.

Further studies of casts of the inner braincase, which show impressions from surface features of the brain, may help clarify N. alesi’s position in ape evolution, Nengo says. Insights are also expected from back, forearm and finger fossils of two or three ancient apes, possibly also from N. alesi, found near the skull site in 2015. Those specimens also date to around 13 million years ago.

Remains of at least two Late Bronze Age initiation ceremonies, in which teenage boys became warriors by eating dogs and wolves, have turned up in southwestern Russia, two archaeologists say. The controversial finds, which date to between roughly 3,900 and 3,700 years ago, may provide the first archaeological evidence of adolescent male war bands described in ancient texts.

Select boys of the Srubnaya, or Timber Grave, culture joined youth war bands in winter rites, where they symbolically became dogs and wolves by consuming canine flesh, contend David Anthony and Dorcas Brown, both of Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y. This type of initiation ceremony coincides with myths recorded in texts from as early as roughly 2,000 years ago by speakers of Indo-European languages across Eurasia, the researchers report in the December Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. 

Those myths link dogs and wolves to youthful male war bands, warfare and death. In the ancient accounts, young warriors assumed names containing words for dogs or wolves, wore dog or wolf skins and, in some cases, ate dogs during initiation ceremonies.

Mythic themes involving dogs from 2,000 years ago may differ from the rites practiced 4,000 years ago, Anthony acknowledges. “But we should look at myths across Eurasia to understand this archaeological site,” he says.

But some researchers are unconvinced by the pair’s explanation for why at least 64 dogs and wolves were sacrificed at the Krasnosamarskoe settlement.

“Archaeologists can weave mythology and prehistory together, but only with extreme caution,” says archaeologist Marc Vander Linden of University College London.

At most, Indo-European mythology suggests that Late Bronze Age folks regarded dogs as having magical properties and perhaps ate them in rituals of some kind, Vander Linden says. But no other archaeological sites have yielded evidence for teenage male war bands or canine-consuming initiation rites, raising doubts about Anthony and Brown’s proposed scenario, he argues.

Some ancient Indo-European myths attribute healing powers to dogs, says archaeologist Paul Garwood of the University of Birmingham in England. In those myths, dogs absorb illness from people, making the canines unfit for consumption. Perhaps ritual specialists at Krasnosamarskoe sacrificed dogs and wolves as part of healing ceremonies without eating the animals, Garwood proposes.

Dog and wolf deposits at the Russian site align with myths connecting these animals to war bands and initiation rites, not healing, Anthony responds.

Michael Witzel, an authority on ancient texts of India and comparative mythology at Harvard University, agrees. Anthony and Brown have identified the first archaeological evidence in support of ancient Indo-European myths about young, warlike “wolf-men” who lived outside of society’s laws, he says.

Excavations at Krasnosamarskoe in 1999 and 2001 yielded 2,770 dog bones, 18 wolf bones and six more bones that came from either dogs or wolves. Those finds represent 36 percent of all animal bones unearthed at the site. Dogs account for no more than 3 percent of animal bones previously unearthed at each of six other Srubnaya settlements, so canines were not typically eaten and may have been viewed as a taboo food under most circumstances, the investigators say.

Bones from dogs’ entire bodies displayed butchery marks and burned areas produced by roasting. Dogs’ heads were chopped into 3- to 7-centimeter-wide pieces using a standardized sequence of cuts. It was a brutal, ritual behavior that demanded practice and skill, Anthony asserts. Cattle and sheep or goat remains at Krasnosamarskoe also show signs of butchery and cooking but do not include any sliced-and-diced skulls.

Separate arrays of dog bones indicate that at least two initiation ceremonies, and possibly several more, occurred over Krasnosamarskoe’s 200-year history. Microscopic analyses of annual tissue layers in tooth roots of excavated animals indicated that dogs almost always had been killed in the cold half of the year, from late fall through winter. Cattle were slaughtered in all seasons, so starvation can’t explain why dogs were sometimes killed and eaten, the researchers say.

DNA extracted from teeth of 21 dogs tagged 15 as definitely male and another four as possibly male, leaving two confirmed females. A focus on sacrificing male dogs at Krasnosamarskoe is consistent with a rite of passage for young men, Anthony says.

Excavations of a Srubnaya cemetery at the Russian site produced bones of two men, two women, an adult of undetermined sex and 22 children, most between ages 1 and 7. The two men, who both displayed injuries from activities that had put intense stress on their knees, ankles and lower backs, may have been ritual specialists, the researchers speculate. These men would have directed initiation ceremonies into war bands, Anthony says.

A round belly, stubby feet and a tapering tail made one armored reptile a lousy swimmer. Despite earlier reports, Eusaurosphargis dalsassoi might not have swum at all, scientists now say.

E. dalsassoi was first identified in 2003. Fossils were found near Monte San Giorgio at the Swiss-Italian border alongside the remains of marine reptiles and fish that lived roughly 240 million years ago. That association led scientists to conclude the creature was aquatic. But a complete skeleton of E. dalsassoi unearthed in 2002 in the Swiss Alps and recently assembled contradicts that idea.

At just under 20 centimeters long, the fossil, probably of a youngster, shows that E. dalsassoi widened at the stomach and slithered forward with stiff elbow and knee joints and spadelike claws. That’s not a swimmer’s build, paleontologist Torsten Scheyer of the University of Zurich and colleagues report June 30 in Scientific Reports.

Armed with rows of small spikes along its back and spear-shaped plates framing its head, sides and tail, the animal resembled today’s girdled lizards. The researchers speculate that this particular E. dalsassoi died on a beach and then got washed into the ocean.

A strange property of spider silk helps explain how the arachnids avoid twirling wildly at the end of their ropes.

Researchers from China and England harvested silk from two species of golden orb weaver spiders, Nephila edulis and Nephila pilipes, and tested it with a torsion pendulum. The device has a hanging weight that rotates clockwise or counterclockwise, twisting whatever fiber it hangs from. When a typical fiber is twisted, the weight spins back and forth around an equilibrium point, eventually returning to its original orientation.

But unlike several fibers the scientists tested — copper wires, carbon fibers and even human hair — the spider silk deformed when twisted. That distortion changed the silk’s equilibrium point and cut down on the back-and-forth spinning, the scientists report in the July 3 Applied Physics Letters. Eventually, scientists might design spin-resistant ropes for mountain climbers, who, like spiders, should avoid doing the twist.

Some deep-sea tube worms get long in the tooth ... er, tube. Living several decades longer than its shallow-water relatives, Escarpia laminata has the longest known life span for a tube worm, aging beyond 300 years, researchers report in the August Science of Nature.

E. laminata lives 1,000 to 3,300 meters deep in the Gulf of Mexico, near seafloor vents that seep energy-rich compounds that feed bacteria that feed the tube worms. In 2006, biologists marked 356 E. laminata in their natural habitat and measured how much the creatures had grown a year later. To estimate the ages of tube worms of different sizes, the researchers plugged E. laminata’s average yearly growth rate — along with estimates of birthrates and death rates, based on observations of another 1,046 tube worms — into a simulation. The species’s typical life span is 100 to 200 years, the researchers calculate, but some larger tube worms may be more than 300 years old.

With few large predators, deep-sea tube worms have got it good, says study coauthor Alanna Durkin, a biologist at Temple University in Philadelphia. “Once they find a seat at the buffet, they’re pretty set for hundreds of years.” The researchers’ methodology appears robust, says ocean scientist David Reynolds of Cardiff University in Wales, who was not involved in the work. Although variable environmental conditions could affect growth rate over time, he says.

Capinatator — which means grasping swimmer — lived 500 million years ago at a time when creatures started getting bigger and more diverse.

The new creature dubbed Capinatator praetor missus is so different that scientists said the fossils represent not only a new species but a new genus - a larger grouping of life - as well.
Long before dinosaurs roamed the Earth, a bizarre creature with a Venus flytrap-like head swam the seas.
Scientists have uncovered fossils of a tiny faceless pre historic sea worm with 50 spines jutting out of its head. When some unsuspecting critter came too close, its jaw-like spines snapped together and dinner was served.
The discovery reported in Thursday's journal Current Biology offers a glimpse into the Cambrian explosion of life on Earth about 541 million years ago.
The new creature dubbed Capinatator praetor missus is so different that scientists said the fossils represent not only a new species but a new genus - a larger grouping of life - as well.
It was only 4 inches long and its spines were about one-third of an inch long. It feasted on smaller plankton and shrimp-like creatures.
It is an ancestor of a group of marine arrow worms called chaetognatha that are abundant in the world's oceans. The prehistoric version was larger and with far more spines in its facial armour but without the specialised teeth of its descendants, said Derek Briggs of Yale University who led a team that discovered the trove of fossils in two national parks in British Columbia, Canada.
"The spines are like miniature hooks, although more gently curved. They were stiff rather than flexible," Briggs said in an email. "It's hard to say why there are so many spines in the fossil example - but presumably thus armed it was a successful predator."
Capinatator - whose name translates to grasping swimmer - lived 500 million years ago at a time when creatures started getting bigger and more diverse. It's difficult to find complete fossils belonging to the Chaetognatha family because they decayed easily, said Briggs. This latest find, however, was so good that even soft tissue was saved, giving scientists a good idea of what Capinatator looked like.
The discovery expands scientists' knowledge of a "pretty enigmatic" group of animals from the Cambrian era, said Smithsonian paleobiologist Doug Erwin, who had no role in the research.

As per a Facebook post of Territory Wildlife Park, who possess the beautiful snake now after it was handed over to them by a local, an 'incredibly rare genetic mutation' has led to birth of this amazing serpent.

New Delhi: Rare genetic mutation has led to the birth of a stunning white snake in Australia, that has not been seen ever before.
As per a Facebook post of Territory Wildlife Park, who possess the beautiful snake now after it was handed over to them by a local, an 'incredibly rare genetic mutation' has led to birth of this amazing serpent.
The non-venomous snake was rescued while being attacked by a dog and handed over to Territory Wildlife Park authorities, who now say that it will now be put on display.
The park, in the comments section of their facebook post, have clarified that that the snake is not albino but leucistic, meaning that there is partial loss of pigmentation in an animal.
The black eyes of the reptile prove that it is leucistic.

The new genus and species Borealopelta markmitchelli used camouflage to hide from predators despite being built like a tank, researchers said.

Toronto: Scientists have discovered the world's best-preserved armoured dinosaur - dubbed as the 'Mona Lisa' of dinosaurs - in Canada that dates back about 110 million years.
The new genus and species Borealopelta markmitchelli used camouflage to hide from predators despite being built like a tank, researchers said.
An analysis of the 18-foot-long specimen's exquisitely well-preserved form, complete with fully armoured skin, suggests that the nodosaur had predators, despite weighing more than 1,300 kilogrammes.
The researchers came to that conclusion based on studies of the dinosaur's skin, showing that the Borealopelta exhibited countershading, a common form of camouflage in which an animal's underside is lighter than its back.
The scientists say the discovery suggests that the dinosaur belonging to the nodosaur family faced predation stress from meat-eating dinosaurs.
"Strong predation on a massive, heavily-armoured dinosaur illustrates just how dangerous the dinosaur predators of the Cretaceous must have been," said Caleb Brown, a scientist at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Canada.
The specimen was found by accident in 2011, by mining machine operator Shawn Funk at the Suncor Millennium Mine in Alberta.
Over the last five and a half years, museum technician Mark Mitchell spent more than 7,000 hours slowly and gently removing rock from around the specimen to reveal the exceptional, fossilised dinosaur inside.
The specimen now represents the best-preserved armoured dinosaur ever found, and one of the best dinosaur specimens in the world, the researchers said.
"This nodosaur is truly remarkable in that it is completely covered in preserved scaly skin, yet is also preserved in three dimensions, retaining the original shape of the animal," said Mr Brown.
"The result is that the animal looks almost the same today as it did back in the Early Cretaceous. You do not need to use much imagination to reconstruct it; if you just squint your eyes a bit, you could almost believe it was sleeping.
"It will go down in science history as one of the most beautiful and best preserved dinosaur specimens - the Mona Lisa of dinosaurs," Mr Brown said.
The condition of the specimen made it possible for researchers to document the pattern and shape of scales and armour across the body.
They also used chemical analysis of organic compounds in the scales to infer the dinosaur's pigmentation pattern. Those studies revealed that the dinosaur had reddish-brown-pigmented skin with countershading across its body, researchers said.
Although countershading is common, the findings come as surprise because Borealopelta's size far exceeds that of countershaded animals alive today.
It suggests the dinosaur was under enough pressure from predators to select for concealment.